Barbara Kingsolver - Quodid

About

Picture of Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Ellen Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo; and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.

Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.

—Barbara Kingsolver

learning schooling sociology

Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't.

—Barbara Kingsolver

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.

—Barbara Kingsolver

If I got to make just one law, it would be that the men who make the decisions to drop bombs would first, every time, have to spend one whole day taking care of a baby. We were not made to do this killing thing, I swear. Back up. It's a big mistake.

—Barbara Kingsolver

war law children bombs killing care

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

—Barbara Kingsolver

To people who think of themselves as God's house guests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

—Barbara Kingsolver

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

—Barbara Kingsolver

strength laws motherhood

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.

—Barbara Kingsolver

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

—Barbara Kingsolver

What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us. We seem to succumb so easily to the prevailing human tendency to pave such places over, build subdivisions upon them, and name them the Willows, or Peregrine's Roost, or Elk Meadows, after whatever it was that got killed there. Apparently, it's hard for us humans to doubt, even for a minute, that this program of plunking down our edifices at regular intervals over the entire landmass of planet Earth is overall a good idea.

—Barbara Kingsolver

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.

—Barbara Kingsolver

It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

—Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

—Barbara Kingsolver in The Lacuna

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.

—Barbara Kingsolver

Books

Barbara Kingsolver has the following books quoted on Quodid:

The Poisonwood Bible
The Lacuna