Barbara Kingsolver
American fiction writer.
Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.
What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.
Life always provides me with better jokes than any I could invent.
The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
The truth needs so little rehearsal.