Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. Barbara Kingsolver More Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver More Quotes From Barbara Kingsolver Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen. Barbara Kingsolver solitude choices world You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm. Barbara Kingsolver imagination waiting book Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow. Barbara Kingsolver perfect inspiring life Morning always comes. Barbara Kingsolver morning God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves. Barbara Kingsolver religious life long There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin. Barbara Kingsolver skins house people Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage. Barbara Kingsolver knives growing-up ignorance Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery store shelves with 30 brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and think, "What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?" I think it's fear. Codi, I hope you won't be hurt by this, but I don't think I'll ever be going back. I don't think I can. Barbara Kingsolver hurt dream mean I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires. Barbara Kingsolver predator scent missing This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. Barbara Kingsolver convenience good-food stories Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at. Barbara Kingsolver southern fun country In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain. Barbara Kingsolver stress careers jobs My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit. Barbara Kingsolver coats mother father The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing. Barbara Kingsolver childhood appreciate blessing Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history... Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger. Barbara Kingsolver alive different views I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids. Barbara Kingsolver mother character kids The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep. Barbara Kingsolver survival choices promise I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control. Barbara Kingsolver guy responsibility thinking 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. Barbara Kingsolver phones mother children A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill. Barbara Kingsolver chill rain hair