Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

Codi: "So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can't think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives." Loyd: "Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."

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.

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.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work — that goes on, it adds up.

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.

I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you're good, bad things can still happen. And if you're bad, you can still be lucky.

There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.