Quotes about Understanding
I should like to write my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.
— Barbara Kingsolver
What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.
— Barbara Kingsolver
His confidence was enviable and maddening. Most of the time she didn't want him to solve or contradict her worries, she just needed him to listen and agree with her on the awfulness at hand. This was a principle of marriage she'd explained many times.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love, whom to castigate.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Words were not just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.
— Barbara Kingsolver
This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.
— Barbara Kingsolver
It is true 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
There's people I love. But there's so many other kinds of love, too. And people act so hateful to every kind but their own.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man? Or a coarse piece of yarn? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean? If it's a camel, the rich man might as well not even try. But if it's the yarn, he might well succeed with a lot of effort, you see?
— Barbara Kingsolver
No matter what happens on God's green earth, Father acts like it's a movie he's already seen and we're just dumb for not knowing how it comes out.
— Barbara Kingsolver
I shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.
— Barbara Kingsolver