It's What you do that Makes your Soul

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.
― Barbara Kingsolver

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

It's what you do that makes your soul.
― Barbara Kingsolver

What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

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

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
― Barbara Kingsolver

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna