Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

I grew up bar-singing and saw all kinds of ways people tried to outrun their emotional pain. It doesn't work. You end up with the original pain, as well as new pain added on top of it from the tactics you used trying to avoid it in the first place. It's best to take a deep breath, bolster yourself, and walk through it.

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.

But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

One of the hardest lessons of childhood is reckoning with the instability of the world.

People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.

She’s really gone, then. The little girl with the back of her shirt sticking out like a duck tail, the one who needed help reaching the dishes, and who begged to see the frosted cakes in the bakery window. Time and tragedy have forced her to grow too quickly, at least for my taste, into a young woman who stitches bleeding wounds and knows our mother can hear only so much.

But the gates of my happy childhood had clanged shut behind me; I had become adult enough to recognize the need to conceal unbearable emotions for the sake of others.

The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it.

There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.

The price of wisdom is innocence. So, I have definitely become wiser but sadly a little less innocent.

When my dad passed, I felt like I had to grow up very quickly.

One can't get over the habit of being a little girl all at once.

Fear is another emotion that is strongly suppressed. We cannot afford to be afraid, and so we don't allow ourselves to sense and feel the fear within us. We lower our brows to deny it, set our jaws to defy it, and smile to deceive ourselves. But inwardly we remain scared to death.

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.

I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood.

The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

I'm happier in the way a guy gets happier when he starts to mature. It doesn't make things easier, but I'm so much better at handling them.

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

I'm only waiting for my wife to grow up.

Act your age don't pretend to be older than you are give yourself time to grow

...therefore all childish fear must be put away.

For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.