Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Literally, if someone says I am grounded, everyday I am at home, I actually have my hands in the ground and dirt under my fingernails. I don't have a staff to do it all for me. I still plant a seed and I'm amazed it grows.

Spreading manure is a great way of bringing yourself down to earth.

Agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds - it's the production of food and fiber from the world's land and waters. Without agriculture it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, university, church or army. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy.

All man has to do is cooperate with the big forces, the sun, the rain, the growing urge. Seeds sprout, stems grow, leaves spread in the sunlight. Man plants, weeds, cultivates and harvests. It sounds simple, and it is simple, with the simplicity of great truths.

We are on a mission: we are called to the cultivation of the earth .

The only way you can stay on top is to remember to touch bottom and get back to basics.

I went to university for a couple of years and I didn't enjoy university. The studying and the accountancy, economics, I just hated that stuff. Now the irony is here I am lawyer, accountant, I do it all day every day and sit at a desk. So I've never ended up where I wanted to be in many ways. I always wanted to be a farmer.

I have often thought that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. Such a variety of subjects, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the success of another, and instead of one harvest a continued one through the year.

It's funny; as I get older I'm reverting to my roots - I want to plant stuff.

It's easy for Americans to forget that the food they eat doesn't magically appear on a supermarket shelf.

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

How we grow food has enormous effects on the environment - climate change as well as pollution of air, water, and soil.

Cursing the weather is not good farming

There are 6 million people in the world. With organic farming, we will only be able to feed 4 billion of them. Which 2 billion will volunteer to die?

The cultivation of the earth, as the primary and most certain source of national supply ... has intrinsically a strong claim to pre-eminence over every other kind of industry.

My whole interest in food grew from my interest in gardens and the question of how we engage with the natural world. To go back even further, I got interested in gardens because I was interested in nature and wilderness and Thoreau and Emerson.

Large-scale deforestation can be prevented while increasing food production through better, smarter agriculture.

Once you engage with the simple enough business of feeding yourself, of soil and water, weather, season and harvest, it becomes personal. It is about you, your family and friends. Food becomes an aspect of those relationships as well as your intimacy with your plot.

In some other life I must have been a pioneer woman because I love to have my hands in the dirt.

Blessed be agriculture! if one does not have too much of it.

A little too abstract, a little too wise, It is time for us to kiss the earth again, It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies, Let the rich life run to the roots again.

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.

Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind.

When you walk with naked feet, how can you ever forget the Earth?