Quotes from The Poisonwood Bible

“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, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“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.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“Listen. 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. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“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, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

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

“There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from 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, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“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, quote from 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, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“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, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“...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, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it's wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them.... Chains rattle, rivers roll, animals startle and bolt, forests inspire and expand, babies stretch open-mouthed from the womb, new seedlings arch their necks and creep forward into the light. Even a language won't stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flag, casting themselves in bronze.... Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

“If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Poisonwood Bible

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Popular quotes

“During the winter, me and Rowley stored up some snowballs in my freezer so we could have a snowball fight when the weather got warm.”
― Jeff Kinney, quote from Hard Luck

“gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, quote from Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.”
― Jessica Brody, quote from Unremembered

“I don’t believe I’m better than anyone else. With beating hearts and open minds, we are all the same.”
― J.R. Ward, quote from The Shadows

“A little road not made of man,
Enabled of the eye,
Accessible to thill of bee,
Or cart of butterfly.

If town it have, beyond itself,
’T is that I cannot say;
I only sigh,—no vehicle
Bears me along that way.”
― Emily Dickinson, quote from The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

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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.

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