Quotes From "The Poisonwood Bible" By Barbara Kingsolver

A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name. 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

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

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment. 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

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes, ' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes. Barbara Kingsolver

Until that moment I'd thought I could have it both ways; to be one of them, and also my husband's wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars. Barbara Kingsolver

A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever. Barbara Kingsolver

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony. Barbara Kingsolver

You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next. Barbara Kingsolver

I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother. Barbara Kingsolver

Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light. Barbara Kingsolver

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill. Barbara Kingsolver

...I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them... Barbara Kingsolver

It’s a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking I was losing my sight or maybe my hearing. But it was the sense of smell that was gone. Even in the grocery store, surrounded in one aisle by more kinds of food than will ever be known in a Congolese lifetime, there was nothing on the air but a vague, disinfected emptiness. I mentioned this to Anatole, who’d long since taken note of it, of course. “The air is just blank in America, ” I said. “You can’t ever smell what’s around you, unless you stick your nose right down into something."“ Maybe that is why they don’t know about Mobutu, ” he suggested. Barbara Kingsolver

It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down. Barbara Kingsolver

That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: "Nobody else is going to do this. Barbara Kingsolver

Move on. Walk forward into the light. Barbara Kingsolver

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards. Barbara Kingsolver

Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise. Barbara Kingsolver

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own. Barbara Kingsolver

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light. Barbara Kingsolver

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

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with a clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune. Barbara Kingsolver

I know what it is: it's a green mamba snake away up in the tree. You don't have to be afraid of them anymore because you are one. They lie so still on the tree branch; they are the same everything as the tree. You could be right next to one and not even know. It's so quiet there. That's just exactly what I want to go and be, when I have to disappear. Your eyes will be little and round but you are so far up there you can look down and see the whole world, Mama and everybody. The tribes of Ham, Shem, and Japheth all together. Finally you are the highest one of all. Barbara Kingsolver

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization. Barbara Kingsolver

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill. Barbara Kingsolver

Take your place, then. Look at what happened from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone. Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the shore, spying on the jungle’s edge through their fitted brass lenses. Imagine that by some miracle of dread or reverence they lowered their spyglasses, turned, set their riggings, sailed on. Imagine all who came after doing the same. What would that Africa be now? All I can think of is the other okapi, the one they used to believe in. A unicorn that could look you in the eye. Barbara Kingsolver

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?.. I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist. Barbara Kingsolver

If chained is where you have been, your ams will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from. Barbara Kingsolver

Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say ... Barbara Kingsolver