Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

He is the one wife belonging to many white men. Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and wide from men who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire's economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.

That hand looked a hundred years old. Knuckles and gristle.

Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

He thinks people's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

The need to shelter her family never lifted its weight from her shoulders, but in practical terms she was useful to no one there but the dog and the baby.

When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order." "If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known."

Corporate growers, if their only motive is profit, will find ways to follow the letter of organic regulations while violating their spirit.

my heart felt like a soft, damaged place in my chest, like a bruise on a peach.

Nobody truly decided for themselves. There was too much information. What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array of topics.

Physical pleasure was such a convincing illusion, and sex, the ultimate charade of safety.

They both went quiet, imagining a river of irises. Thatcher lay watching the sky through the leaves, white clouds skipping across small lenses of light. Here was a world, where he'd asked for nothing. He would escape with his life before the dust had settled on the collapse of his falling house.

My favored mulching method is to cover the ground between rows of plants with a year's worth of our saved newspapers; the paper and soy-based ink will decompose by autumn. Then we cover all that newsprint—comics, ax murderers, presidents, and all—with a deep layer of old straw. It is grand to walk down the rows dumping armloads of moldy grass glop onto the faces of your less favorite heads of state: a year in review, already starting to compost.