Barbara Kingsolver Life Quotations

The very least you can do in your life is to 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.

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.

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

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.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.

God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

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.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.