Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Most of them don't know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what anticommunism is. The two are practically unrelated.

They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias.

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.

The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?

He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can't have will fit in a human hand.

Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the put-together of all your past choices.

The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of the whole dirty deal. Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a natural breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level, against the wholly artificial nature of how foods are produced.