Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but you'll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.

Words were not just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.

The wonder to me now is that I thought my life worth saving...Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious.

This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go. 'We're like coyotes,' he said. 'Get to a good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you're home. Once you know how, you can always do that, no matter what. You won't forget.

I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.

Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat.

Sept 15 1930 at the independence festival of the school of cretins…At the head of the table by the bowl of pomegranates, Senora Bartolome had put a note: Take only one, our Lord Jesus is watching!. A second note appeared at the foot of the table beside the sugared almonds: Take all you want, Jesus is looking at the pomegranates.

Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God's glory or just to keep the sand out of the house?

I felt the breath of God go cold against my skin.

So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord.

In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.