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

“You’re…you’re what? Where?” I stood up and glimpsed myself in the mirror. I was a vision, having changed into satin pajama pants, a torn USC sweatshirt, and polka-dotted toe socks, and to top it off, my hair was fastened in a haphazard knot on the top of my head with a no. 2 Ticonderoga pencil. Who wouldn’t want me?
“I’m outside,” he repeated, throwing in a trademark chuckle just to be extra mean. “Get out here.”
“But…but…,” I stalled, hurriedly sliding the pencil out of my hair and running around the room, stripping off my pathetic house clothes and searching in vain for my favorite faded jeans. “But…but…I’m in my pajamas.”
Another trademark chuckle. “So?” he asked. “You’d better get out here or I’m comin’ in…”
“Okay, okay…,” I replied. “I’ll be right down.” Panting, I settled for my second-favorite jeans and my favorite sweater of all time, a faded light blue turtleneck I’d worn so much, it was almost part of my anatomy. Brushing my teeth in ten seconds flat, I scurried down the stairs and out the front door.
Marlboro Man was standing outside his pickup, hands inside his pockets, his back resting against the driver-side door. He grinned, and as I walked toward him, he stood up and walked toward me, too. We met in the middle--in between his vehicle and the front door--and without a moment of hesitation, greeted each other with a long, emotional kiss. There was nothing funny or lighthearted about it. That kiss meant business.
Our lips separated for a short moment. “I like your sweater,” he said, looking at the light blue cotton rib as if he’d seen it before. I’d hurriedly thrown it on the night we’d met a few months earlier.
“I think I wore this to the J-bar that night…,” I said. “Do you remember?”
“Ummm, yeah,” he said, pulling me even closer. “I remember.” Maybe the sweater had magical powers. I’d have to be sure to hold on to it.
We kissed again, and I shivered in the cold night air. Wanting to get me out of the cold, he led me to his pickup and opened the door so we could both climb in. The pickup was still warm and toasty, like a campfire was burning in the backseat. I looked at him, giggled like a schoolgirl, and asked, “What have you been doing all this time?”
“Oh, I was headed home,” he said, fiddling with my fingers. “But then I just turned around; I couldn’t help it.” His hand found my upper back and pulled me closer. The windows were getting foggy. I felt like I was seventeen.
“I’ve got this problem,” he continued, in between kisses.
“Yeah?” I asked, playing dumb. My hand rested on his left bicep. My attraction soared to the heavens. He caressed the back of my head, messing up my hair…but I didn’t care; I had other things on my mind.
“I’m crazy about you,” he said.
By now I was on his lap, right in the front seat of his Diesel Ford F250, making out with him as if I’d just discovered the concept. I had no idea how I’d gotten there--the diesel pickup or his lap. But I was there. And, burying my face in his neck, I quietly repeated his sentiments. “I’m crazy about you, too.”
― Ree Drummond, quote from The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels

“I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power....”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

“The prophecy is clear, Your Highness. The Messiah shall topple all the kingdoms of the world. Even yours.”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, quote from Unholy Night

“This book tells the story of that moment in time. It is a story of high adventure set during the age of exploration—when Francis Drake, Henry Hudson, and Captain John Smith were expanding the boundaries of the world, and Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Galileo, Descartes, Mercator, Vermeer, Harvey, and Bacon were revolutionizing human thought and expression.”
― Russell Shorto, quote from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

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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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