Barbara Kingsolver

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

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.

Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.

While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.

I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.

...Animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble?'Soli, I'm going to tell you. He needs to go rub his soul against life. ...

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.

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.

Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing.

The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.