Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

How could two people get the same set of parts and make such different constructions? But then, there was rising. That had to be taken into account. What could a doormat rear but a pair of boots?

War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation

Good people don't give up on the ones they love.

There seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting it out, right where you thought you could see it all.

How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I'll not live to see the meek inherit anything.

If you can't live by the laws the LORD God made for the world, they'll go into effect regardless.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten.

What I'm saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do. Not even the President. It's like it's become unpatriotic.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin, see it in your mind's eye and smell it with your mind's nose! But forming these images from the printed page is a skill you have to develop when you're fairly young, I think, or else it's very difficult to read for pleasure later on.

You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist of history rather than a spectator.