Quotes from Pigs in Heaven

“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.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“The thing is, it's my own fault. I just can't put up with a person that won't go out of his way for me. And that's what a man is. Somebody that won't go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“Do you think its possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don't need to rise above it?”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“Sympathizing over the behavior of men is the baking soda of women's friendships, it seems,the thing that makes them bubble and rise.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“It's monstrous, what one person will do to another.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't, this world would end at once.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but you'll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“Alice hands Annawake a handkerchief. Young people never carry them, she's noticed. They haven't yet learned that heartbreak can catch up to you on any given day.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“I’m always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“She married him two years ago for love, or so she thought, and he's a good enough man but a devotee of household silence. His idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks. ... The quiet only subsides when Harland sleeps and his tonsils make up for lost time. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“I was so depressed I stopped using hair spray for three weeks.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“You talk about her as if she is the Notre Dame Cathedral!" "She is. And the Statue of Liberty and Abbey Road and the best burrito of your life. Didn't you know?”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“The clock gulps softly, eating second whole while she waits...”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“I've just fallen on some bad luck and landed jelly side down.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“They rock against each other, holding on, and the birds in the forest raise their voices to drown out the secret of creation.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“She climbs down and pours half an inch of Jim Beam into a Bengals mug that came free with a tank of gas. Alice would just as soon get her teeth cleaned as watch the Bengals. That's the price of staying around when your heart's not in it, she thinks. You get to be cheerleader for a sport you never chose.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“Let's go take a walk down to the blue hole. You need to look at some water.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he's been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they've been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty's husband's brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in LIFE magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she's still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she's pretty and special. which she is. That's the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“Then again, do you have to be told every single thing about the world before you know it?”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

“WOMEN ON THEIR OWN RUN in Alice’s family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Pigs in Heaven

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Popular quotes

“Men, Kellhus had once told her, were like coins: they had two sides. Where one side of them saw, the other side of them was seen, and though all men were both at once, men could only truly know the side of themselves that saw and the side of others that was seen—they could only truly know the inner half of themselves and the outer half of others.
At first Esmenet thought this foolish. Was not the inner half the whole, what was only imperfectly apprehended by others? But Kellhus bid her to think of everything she’d witnessed in others. How many unwitting mistakes? How many flaws of character? Conceits couched in passing remarks. Fears posed as judgements …
The shortcomings of men—their limits—were written in the eyes of those who watched them. And this was why everyone seemed so desperate to secure the good opinion of others—why everyone played the mummer. They knew without knowing that what they saw of themselves was only half of who they were. And they were desperate to be whole.
The measure of wisdom, Kellhus had said, was found in the distance between these two selves.
Only afterward had she thought of Kellhus in these terms. With a kind of surpriseless shock, she realized that not once—not once!—had she glimpsed shortcomings in his words or actions. And this, she understood, was why he seemed limitless, like the ground, which extended from the small circle about her feet to the great circle about the sky. He had become her horizon.
For Kellhus, there was no distance between seeing and being seen. He alone was whole. And what was more, he somehow stood from without and saw from within. He made whole …”
― R. Scott Bakker, quote from The Warrior Prophet

“started to sit up, but his hand snaked around my stomach and pulled me back to him. “You should try to get some more sleep,” he said. “I can’t,” I said. “Not until this is over.” He sat up beside me, taking my hand in his and quickly kissing the back of it before suggesting, “Run?” The man knows me. I glanced out the small window. The sun was yet to appear on the horizon and rain fell lightly, but the wind had eased for now. I beamed. “Coffee first.” He laughed as he stood up and tossed me a T-shirt. “Coffee first.” And it turns out, even when the world might be about to end, a girl can still swoon.”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Empower

“Yes. I tried to use the same technique with you. I didn’t want to pass out.”
― Lynsay Sands, quote from Vampire Most Wanted

“If I could take people out of their heads for a little while, if I could give them a dose of fantasy, that was all that mattered. You can't put a price on escape.”
― Eva Rice, quote from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

“The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.”
― Rebecca West, quote from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

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