Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Eventually we will learn that the loss of indivisible love is another of our necessary losses, that loving extends beyond the mother-child pair, that most of the love we receive in this world is love we will have to share--and that sharing begins at home, with our sibling rivals.

Someone once told me that children are like heroin. You always want more. Yet first-borns are special because you'll never have your first child again.

We already had an adopted daughter, 10-year-old Courtney, from my previous marriage. To me, there is no difference between 'natural' and 'adopted.' My own childhood showed me that when it comes to loving your kids, concepts like that don't apply. I was the oldest of six, and three of my siblings were adopted. Mom and Dad even took in foster children. 'There are no limits to how much you can love,' Dad always said.

Peer attachments are not the problem themselves. It's when they compete with adult attachments that the problems emerge. It's just like when siblings get attached to each other. If they start revolving around each other, then the parents can't do anything with them because it's a competing attachment.

I love being with my children. They're fascinating people.

God bless you if you have one child, but I don't think anybody should have just one child. Everybody needs a sibling. I have siblings, and I have so many amazing, precious memories with my siblings. I don't know what I would do if I had been an only child.

I have six children and I love all my kids more than anything in the world.

Being a mother adds another emotional dimension, a feel for children that I didn't have before I had one. They were a pain before.

My first child is going to be the oldest sibling to the next kid, and that may change with each and every year. I'm looking forward to how one baby influences the other, and to my family as a whole, to every single chapter.

I've got two younger brothers.

Once you've taken account of the quality of sibling relationships, knowing about the quality of parenting doesn't add much information.

I look back in retrospect, and I would never say I regret not one of my children. They are why I live.

I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.

Praise the child, and you make love to the mother.

The thing I like the best, especially being a parent of so many kids, Is that they're all so different. You love them all equally, but they're all so different from each other and that's the cool thing, to see their personalities start to develop and see how unique and different they all are and to be able to love them in their own unique ways. It's really, really, really special.

All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

one thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more.

All my children are my babies. They're our babies.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

I grew up an only child, so I was so much more adult. My eldest daughter is 10, and I was so much more of an adult than she is. She just doesn't care for the real world. She's not interested.

It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.

I'm an only child. My mum and dad are six in each family. They're both twins, and they only wanted one. I always say to them though that they're lucky - it could have all gone wrong.

Children can scarcely be fashioned to meet with our likes and our purpose. Just as God did us give them, so must we hold them and love them, nurture and teach them to fullness and leave them to be what they are.