The Bean Trees

This was, as is relatively evident in the plot development, Barbara Kingsolver's first novel. Most people are familiar with her as the author of The Poisonwood Bible.


"I told her I didn't know, because I didn't have a daddy. That I was lucky that way. She said yeah."

"'Feeding a girl is like feeding the neighbor's New Year pig. All that work. In the end, it goes to some other family.'"

"Finally, late in the night, she cried until her eye sockets felt empty. At the beach she had gotten seawater in her eyes and they felt like this. Angel had warned her to keep them shut, but she had wanted to see where she was going. You never knew what kind of thing could be down there under the water."

"I could never figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we've got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don't we?'"

"'Whatever you want the most, it's going to be the worst thing for you.'"

"For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise. Nothing on earth was truly harmless."

"'Hogs go deaf at harvest time.' It meant that people would only hear what they wanted to hear."

"'But still, you know, something went wrong. You're supposed to love the same person your whole life long till death do you part and all that. And if you don't, well, you've got to have screwed up somewhere.'"

"'This is how Americans think...You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.'"

"We sat there in the shadowy living room thinking our thoughts. You could hear us swallowing our beer."

"'It seems like, if you get to know them well enough, everyone has had something awful happen to them.'"

"No matter how hard I tried to breathe, I felt like I couldn't get air. At night I'd lie on top of the damp sheets and think: breathe in, breathe out. It close out every other thought, and it closed out the possibility of sleep, though sometimes I wondered what was the point of working so hard to stay alive, if that's what I was doing."

"It seems like almost anything is better than having only yourself to blame when you screw things up."