Bee Ostrowsky > Bee's Quotes

“I’m beginning at least to notice when I’m consuming the United Nations of edible plants and animals all in one seating. (Or the WTO, is more like it.) On a winter’s day not long ago I was served a sumptuous meal like this, finished off with a dessert of raspberries. Because they only grow in temperate zones, not the tropics, these would have come from somewhere deep in the Southern Hemisphere. I was amazed that such small, eminently bruisable fruits could survive a zillion-mile trip looking so good (I myself look pretty wrecked after a mere red-eye from California), and I mumbled some reserved awe over that fact. I think my hostess was amused by my country-mouse naïveté. “This is New York,” she assured me. “We can get anything we want, any day of the year.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“Here in the eastern woodlands we have the black, common, tulip, and white morels, and one unfortunate little cousin called (I am so sorry) the Dog Pecker.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“Oh, the different consciousness between the grieving and the dying! One sees midnight, the other joyful sunrise. One sees death, the other Life as never before.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student

“How many of us count fictional characters, or those we've never met, among our closest friends? My hand's up.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student

“We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“In summer a young rooster’s fancy turns to…how can I say this delicately? The most ham-fisted attempts at courtship I’ve ever had to watch. (And yes, I’m including high school.)”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“I’ve seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The “free-range vegetarian hens” testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone’s trained them with little shock collars.)”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of them hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight. “Wow,” we all said—“what a good idea!” Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won’t put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“Twenty pounds of tomatoes will cook down into a pot of tomato sauce that fits into five one-quart freezer boxes, good for one family meal each. (Be warned, the fragrance of your kitchen will cause innocent bystanders to want to marry you.)”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“I think of my canning as fast food, paid for in time up front.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“I certainly sense a bit of that when urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, “so far from everything?” (When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.)”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“Already? How can this be?” I would ask, shattered by the terrible truth that I needed a three-ring binder and some #2 pencils. It’s not that school was a bad thing. Summer was just so much better.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, “Thou shalt not.” Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“I’ve heard a Buddhist monk suggest the number of food-caused deaths is minimized in steak dinners, which share one death over many meals, whereas the equation is reversed for a bowl of clams.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“Christmas music fills our ears with tales of a Palestinian miracle birth, a generous Turkish saint whom the Dutch dressed in a red suit, and a Druid ceremonial tree…”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“48-point type, a letter size that big-city newspapers probably reserve for special occasions such as Armageddon. Out here in the heartland, we are not waiting that long. Our local paper’s stance on the great big headline letters is: You got ’em, you use ’em.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“We newspaper readers all have our pet vexations. Somewhere in one of those sections is the column we anxiously turn to for the sole purpose of disagreeing with the columnist. Volubly.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“I try to be open-minded. And yet this food writer has less sense than God gave a goose about where food comes from. I’d worked on our relationship, moving through the stages of bafflement, denial, and asking this guy out loud, “Where do you live, the moon?”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“we’ve learned that some of our favorite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the threats. Now the reforms required of us are more systematic, and nobody seems to want to go first. (To be more precise, the U.S.A. wants to go last.)”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It’s the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society—to ridicule the small gesture.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“They were going to do it against his truck under the clear night sky, and she wanted to feel every bit of him. Colors swirled in her mind in a pulsing pattern of red and blue and red and blue and red and… and… And then she heard the siren.”
― Abigail Sharpe, Who Wants to Marry a Cowboy?

“If this understanding of the good news of Jesus prevailed among Christians, the belief that Jesus’s message is about how to get somewhere else, you could possibly end up with a world in which millions of people were starving, thirsty, and poor; the earth was being exploited and polluted; disease and despair were everywhere; and Christians weren’t known for doing much about it. If it got bad enough, you might even have people rejecting Jesus because of how his followers lived. That would be tragic.”
― Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

“No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don’t read, can’t write, and clearly can’t add.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Dance of the Reptiles: Rampaging Tourists, Marauding Pythons, Larcenous Legislators, Crazed Celebrities, and Tar-Balled Beaches: Selected Columns

“Often when a woman exhibits leadership, she’s accused of having that Jezebel spirit. I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as a Deborah, instead of silenced as a Jezebel. I”
― Sarah Bessey, Jesus Feminist: God's Radical Notion that Women are People Too

“I believe poor people are good people, except the ones that are mean … and they’d be mean even if they were rich.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Don't be afraid to make corrections! Whether the voice came from her memory or was a last whisper from the blinding new star far above, Nita never knew. But she knew what to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she pulled out her pen, her best pen that Fred had saved and changed. She clicked it open. The metal still tingled against her skin, the ink at the point still glittered oddly- the same glitter as the ink with which the bright Book was written. Nita bent quickly over the Book and with the pen, in lines of light, drew from the final circle an arrow pointing up-ward, the way out, the symbol that said change could happen- if, only if-”
― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard