Barbara KingsolverThinkers

America is a place where what we want is very simple... an America as good as its promise.

April is the cruelest month (as T.S. Eliot says) because we come to expect too much from a world which burgeons with promises it can't keep.

Arizona is still an agricultural state. Even after the population boom of the mid-nineties, 85 percent of the state's water still went to thirsty crops like cotton, alfalfa, citrus, and pecan trees. Mild winters offer the opportunity to create an artificial endless summer, as long as we can conjure up water and sustain a chemically induced illusion of topsoil.... Living in Arizona on borrowed water made me nervous.... But these gardens of ours had a drinking problem. So did Arizona farms.

A Child is one who it kills to see grow up, but it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

Cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

Empathy is the opposite of spiritual meanness. It is the capacity to understand that someone else's pain is as meaningful as one's own.

A First child is your own best foot forward. one examines every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world.

A Flower is a plant's way of making love.

Insomnia is like if the light in the refrigerator were on all the time, even after you close the door.

Memory is built to a surprising degree around things unnoticed at the time.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.