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.

"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."

Barbara Kingsolver

"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."

Barbara Kingsolver

"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."

Barbara Kingsolver

"But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will."

Barbara Kingsolver

"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

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

Barbara Kingsolver