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

“May the dog-mother rut with a dead devil!”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Kitchen God's Wife

“[From below comes the noise of a door slamming.]”
― Henrik Ibsen, quote from A Doll's House

“Consistent or inconsistent, no one is exempt from the mystery of the self. Probably we are all inconsistent. The world is just too complicated for a person to be able to afford the luxury of reconciling all of his beliefs with each other. Tension and confusion are important in a world where many decisions must be made quickly. Miguel de Unamuno once said, 'If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.' I would say that we all are in the same boast as the Zen master who, after contradicting himself several times in a row, said to the confused Doko, 'I cannot understand myself.'.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, quote from Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“Twenty, thirty, forty feet. The pressure wasn’t uncomfortable. I’d never tried to push it—to see if there was a limit to how deep I could dive. I knew most regular humans couldn’t go past two hundred feet without crumpling like an aluminum can. I should’ve been blind, too, this deep in the water at night, but I could see the heat from living forms, and the cold of the currents. It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t like regular seeing, but I could tell where everything was. As I got closer to the bottom, I saw three hippocampi—fish-tailed horses—swimming in a circle around an overturned boat. The hippocampi were beautiful to watch. Their fish tails shimmered in rainbow colors, glowing phosphorescent. Their manes were white, and they were galloping through the water the way nervous horses do in a thunderstorm. Something was upsetting them. I got closer and saw the problem. A dark shape—some kind of animal—was wedged halfway under the boat and tangled in a fishing net, one of those big nets they use on trawlers to catch everything at once. I hated those things. It was bad enough they drowned porpoises and dolphins, but they also occasionally caught mythological animals. When the nets got tangled, some lazy fishermen would just cut them loose and let the trapped animals die. Apparently this poor creature had been mucking around on the bottom of Long Island Sound and had somehow gotten itself tangled in the net of this sunken fishing boat. It had tried to get out and managed to get even more hopelessly stuck, shifting the boat in the process. Now the wreckage of the hull, which was resting against a big rock, was teetering and threatening to collapse on top of the tangled animal. The hippocampi were swimming around frantically, wanting to help but not sure how. One was trying to chew the net, but hippocampi teeth just aren’t meant for cutting rope. Hippocampi are really strong, but they don’t have hands, and they’re not (shhh) all that smart. Free”
― Rick Riordan, quote from Percy Jackson and the Olympians

“Correct." Kekrops sounded bitter, like he regretted his decision. "My people were the original Athenians--the gemini."
"Like your zodiac sign?" Percy asked. "I'm a Leo."
"No, stupid," Leo said. "I'm a Leo. You're a Percy.”
― Rick Riordan, quote from The Blood of Olympus

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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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