Quote

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Kind
Close
Blade
Time
Stand
Bend
People
History
Blades
Ends
Knife
Anything
Knives
Enough
Edge
Hard
Edges
Even
Calling
Slicing

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A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
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It's what you do that makes your soul.
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There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
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Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?
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I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
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What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
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This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.
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I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.
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Everything truly important is washable.
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In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.
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Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.
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I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
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It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.
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The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.
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Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
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Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.
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If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of flowers, the elementary kindness of bread. Nothing short of that. It would have to be something as sure as love.
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A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother
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This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
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Loose lips sink ships.
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