Barbara Kingsolver · 245 pages
Rating: (5.9K votes)
“Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”
“As I looked at her there among the pumpkins I was overcome with the color and the intesity of my life. In these moments we are driven to try and hoard happiness by taking photographs, but I know better. The improtant thing was what the colors stood for, the taste of hard apples and the existence of Lena and the exact quality of the sun on the last warm day in October. A photograph would have flattened the scene into a happy moment, whereas what I felt was rapture. The fleeting certainty that I deserved this space I'd been taking up on this earth, and all the air I had breathed.”
“Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.”
“It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.”
“Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.”
“She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.”
“Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn’t matter, you have to go on and have them,” she said. “It works out.”
“It's a relief to share the uncomplicated affection that has passed between people and their dogs for thousands of years.”
“Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.”
“I loved the time spent with him, but felt in some other chamber of my heart that it was time wasted. That I ought to be doing something else while there was time.”
“I don't know," Magda says, "Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon.”
“When he thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able.”
“But I sure do love to whack a grown-up in the morning.”
“It came to her that he was going to leave without making love to her. This would mean they had made love for the last time this morning. But that did not count: this morning they did not know it was for the last time. When the door shut behind him, she still could not believe it. "It can't end like this," she said to herself over and over, drumming with her knuckles on her mouth to keep from screaming.”
“I kiss her again just to keep my mouth from admitting that it was. The beginning of the end. The very start of the saddest goodbye in history. Because after tonight, she’ll walk away from me and go back to him, holding a piece of me in the palm of her hand. And whenever I look up at the sky at night, wondering where she is, if she’s happy, if Evan laughs at her corny jokes or smiles whenever she does, that empty space left behind within me will ache with remembrance. Because her light once filled it. She filled me in a way that nobody on this Earth could. And I’ll never feel whole again.”
“I would have kept those promises—if you had no’ transformed.” “That’s why promises are made, asshole! To be kept no matter the situation.”
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.