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125 Unforgettable Demon Copperhead Quotes

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Demon Copperhead is a fictional story written by the well-known author Barbara Kingsolver.

It came out in 2022 and quickly became a bestseller, even earning a spot in Oprah’s Book Club. The tale is set in Lee County, Virginia, and is told from the perspective of the main character, offering a unique view of both the beautiful and ugly sides of the world.

The book highlights the problems with American institutions but also celebrates the strength of individual spirit.

In this his blog post, I’ve collected some of the most memorable quotes from this powerful novel, providing a glimpse into the profound truths that Kingsolver so skillfully captures through her writing.

These quotes cover a range of themes such as poverty, addiction, faith, and the power of storytelling. Kingsolver’s writing style is raw, authentic and honest, and these quotes are a testament to the emotional depth of her writing.

Summary | Ending Explained

Book Quotes | Book Club Questions

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Demon Copperhead Quotes

  • “The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
    ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I think most of humankind would agree, the hard part of high school is the people.”
    ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it.”
    ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy. This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.”
    ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “People love to believe in danger, as long as it’s you in harm’s way, and them saying bless your heart.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I felt the kindliness of the moss, which is all over everywhere once you get out of the made world. God’s flooring. All the kinds, pillowy, pin-cushiony, shag carpet. Gray sticks of moss with red heads like matchsticks. Some tiny dead part of me woke up to the moss and said, Man. Where you been.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “It’s safer knowing more about people than they know about you.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I said probably they were just scared he was going to put ideas in our heads. She smiled. “Imagine that. A teacher, putting ideas in kids’ heads.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person’s reckless mistake. Only after it’s a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I put my face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn’t? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie’s kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “It’s not something to fix,” he said. “It means strong. Outside of all expectation.” I looked at him. He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, “You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had. The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “But the wicked have a different head for numbers than most. Any bad they do will end up on the side of never-mind. What’s done to them weighs double.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “fallen hero shatters into more sharp pieces than you’d believe.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Living in a holler, the sun gets around to you late in the day, and leaves you early.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The first to fall in any war are forgotten.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back. All I’m saying.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The whole idea of the sermon was how people connect up in various ways, seen and unseen, and that Mr. Peg had tied a lot of knots in the big minnow seine that keeps us all together. Dead but still here, in other words. That’s what killed me the worst.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That’s what the big world thinks it’s worth, to save white-trash orphans.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Aunts standing close in the kitchen like cigarettes in the pack, uncles splayed on furniture like butts in the ashtray.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “All God’s children have to take a shit, but you’d never know it from the way they treat the ones who have to clean it up.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I wondered if DSS had anything like Step 9, where you eventually have to apologize to all the kids you’ve screwed over.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Somebody one time gave me the one where the boy is hateful and sent to bed with no supper, and in his head he’s a monster and goes to this island where it’s all wild monsters like him, seriously ticked off, making their wild rumpus.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “A person has only so much juice, and it’s ideally kept for your homeboys, not all pissed away on strangers before three in the day. Simple as that sounds, it was a game changer for me. I taught myself to save the juice. It’s a skill, like weight training, you do reps. Tell yourself ten times each night, don’t spend your juice on those sirens, worrying about the life screaming past on its way to getting tanked. Don’t spend it on the customers around you at Walmart Supercenter, just do your job without feeling the madness or sadness, the moms on the brink of snatching their kids bald-headed. The carts loaded with cases of PBR and Pampers.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren’t invited. If you’ve been here, you know. If not, must be nice.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “People love to believe in danger, as long as it’s you in harm’s way, and them saying bless your heart.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Sophie’s mother had to leave her dad, to get sober. She says as long as you’re living with an addict, you’re addicted.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Sometimes a good day lasts all about 10 seconds.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Kids up there evidently had brains coming out their ears, to the extent of needing to meet up with other kids for brain-to-brain combat.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you’re on your own with your ghosts. You’re the ship and they’re the bottle.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “rainy day, which this was, still yet and always.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “It’s football. Take that out of high school, it’s like church with no Jesus. Who would even go?” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “If you are one of the few that still hasn’t been, let me tell you what a city is. A hot mess not easily escaped.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “home, it’s different. I mean yes, you want money and a job, but there’s a hundred other things you do for getting by, especially older people and farmers with the crops, tomato gardens and such. Hunting and fishing, plus all the woman things, making quilts and clothes. Whether big or small, you’ve always got the place you’re living on. I’ve known people to raise a beef in the yard behind their rented trailer. I was getting the picture now on why June’s doom castle had freaked me out. Having some ground to stand on, that’s our whole basis. It’s the bags of summer squash and shelly beans everybody gives you from their gardens, and on from there. The porch rockers where the mammaws get together and knit baby clothes for the pregnant high school girls. Sandwiches the church ladies pack for the hungrier kids to take home on weekends.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “And other people made up hillbilly to use on us, for the purpose of being assholes. But they gave us a superpower on accident. Not Mr. Peg’s words, but that’s how I understood it. Saying that word back at people proves they can’t ever be us, or get us, and we are untouchable by their shit.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “When your parent clocks out before you clock in, you can spend way too much of your life staring into that black hole.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Two dead wasps lay on the sill with their heads close together like a tiny murder-suicide.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I would make one of Aunt June as Wonder Nurse, putting a new heart back inside a boy that had his own torn out.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “We’ve got story enough here to eff up more than one young life, but it is a project.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The world is not at all short on this type of thing, it turns out. All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Tommy showed me one with the actual headline “Blight On the Nation.” Another one said “smudge on the map,” that he’d highlighted with yellow marker.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they’d all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Brain of a deer tick, but that’s not something to hold against a running back.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “That a craving can ratchet itself up and up inside a body and mind, at the same time that body’s strength for tolerating its favorite drug goes down and down.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “every step you take, as regards the druggie mother?” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Probably Emmy had moved now. I would be in Knoxville soon, she’d be in Lee County, and whoever was sitting at control center of the universe, laughing his ass off.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “At the start of the service they did that song about Amazing God, and I felt exactly the opposite: I once could see but now I’m blind, was found but now I’m” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “It was hard to get used to being tended to like that. And to rules. Homework gets done, period. No running around on school nights. Pharm parties, not on your life. I didn’t even bring up the idea of getting into her dad’s liquor. Angus had her whole tough act and called a lot of shots in the house, helping to make the grocery list, calling to get the heater fixed, that type of thing. Coach wouldn’t notice till the fridge went empty and the pipes froze, the man was just all football. But Angus had no big worries that I could see. Everything in that house got taken care of, me included. If I stayed here, would I turn into one of these Jonesville Middle School babies? Not something to worry about, I knew. Nobody ever kept me that long.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “word, not Ice Cube. And other people made up hillbilly to use on us, for the purpose of being assholes. But they gave us a superpower on accident. Not Mr. Peg’s words, but that’s how I understood it. Saying that word back at people proves they can’t ever be us, or get us, and we are untouchable by their shit. The world is not at all short on this type of thing, it turns out. All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables. 10” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “that thing of being loved automatically, Jesus on your side.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The main one I could understand was that money-earning ones pay taxes. Whereas you can’t collect shit on what people grow and eat on the spot, or the work they swap with their neighbors. That’s like a percent of blood from a turnip. So, the ones in charge started cooking it into everybody’s brains to look down on the land people, saying we are an earlier stage of human, like junior varsity or cavemen. Weird-shaped heads.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Little trees alongside of the trail were covered with brushy yellow flowers. Witch hazel, that blooms in winter. Mrs. Peggot used to make a salve of that and put it on our scrapes.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “They were always on the side of the money-earning people, and down on the land people, due to various factors Tommy mentioned, monetize this, international banking that. The main one I could understand was that money-earning ones pay taxes.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I was only just now starting to exist.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Like every boy in Lee County I was raised to be a proud mule in a world that has scant use for mules.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “this whole other life of little beings out here minding their business and not actually giving a damn about yours. It could set you back on your haunches, in a good way. Why I liked the woods.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Honestly, I would call us the juice economy. Or I guess used to be, up until everybody started getting wrecked on the newer product. We did not save our juice, we would give it to each and all we meet, because we’re going to need some of that back before long, along with the free advice and power tools. Covered dishes for a funeral, porch music for a wedding, extra hands for getting the tobacco in. Just talking about it made me homesick for the life of unlocked doors that Chartrain called Not the Real World.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “After that I had a new brain-Lysol to calm myself down: walking in the woods with Emmy. I’d picture us holding hands, maybe with our own dog. Being grown-ups. It would be so much safer than being a kid.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “apron back on, and I washed all the dishes while she sat on her wooden stool and watched. I told her just sit, I’ve got this. Miss Betsy acted like she’d never seen a man clean up a kitchen before, which maybe she hadn’t. I wanted to keep her talking about Angus, so I asked” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you’re on your own with your ghosts. You’re the ship, they’re the bottle.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “This was in the before-time, last days of. Still no internet with all the ways of saying, Let’s us be better than those guys so we can hate on them.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “She stuck with a different theory: I needed to be more pushy with them. Did she give up on her dreams? No, she worked hard for what she wanted. Did I expect anybody to look out for Damon if he wouldn’t look out for himself? Life is what you make it! Here’s where Miss Barks didn’t grow up: foster care. She had no clue how people can be living right on the edge of what’s doable. If you push too hard, you can barrel yourself over a damn cliff.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Living in a holler, the sun gets around to you late in the day, and leaves you early. Like much else you might want.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “That hand looked a hundred years old. Knuckles and gristle.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “It’s not that I wanted to be mean. But any time I started feeling sorry for her, something in my brain said Don’t go there, it’s a trap. I’d tried all the options with Mom and had only one place left to go on her. Cold.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “If wishes were horses, like they say. We’d all have different shit to shovel.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can’t stop talking about them. It gets to be” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Now, versus the old days. I said maybe the difference was we could see now what all we were missing. With everybody else in the world being richer than us, doing all kinds of nonsense and getting away with it. It pisses you off. It makes you restless.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “For a minute the Sun came out, while it was snowing. People say that means the devil is beating his wife.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Diamond. He’s bright and shiny and worth a lot. Harder than anything else there is.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The thing about Angus. We both had our crap to live with, and her way was to give no shit whether you liked how she was doing it, or not. But if I wanted to be a different type person and try for popular, she wasn’t going to stand in my way. She was going to help. Not very usual.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “tell him I am mopping the floor, spelled with a silent As you can plainly see, dumbass. He says he doesn’t think that’s going to do the job.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Lonesome! Nothing lonesomer than getting shackled to a bully-man in his house of spite.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “A city is the weirdest, loneliest thing.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “In Lee County they say you have to look hard for a face you’ve not seen before, which surely was true for Mom, who’d directed anybody that could walk to where the Solo cups are kept on Aisle 19.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Ugly as homemade sin.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “…start trusting the ride at some point, because life was not a total & complete dumpster fire, which she was wrong about.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “A dead parent is a tricky kind of ghost. If you can make it into more like a doll, putting it in the real house and clothes and such that they had, it helps you to picture them as a person instead of just a person-shaped hole in the air. Which helps you feel less like a person-shaped invisible kid.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Stoner asks what I think I’m doing. I tell him I am mopping the floor, spelled with a silent As you can plainly see, dumbass.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “There will always be those that look down on your station in life and call it a sty, but if you get in there and wallow, that’s on you.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The moral of his story was how you never know the size of hurt that’s in people’s hearts, or what they’re liable to do about it, given the chance.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can’t stop talking about them.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “excited on the phone he doesn’t start with hello. Demon! I know why we’re the dogshit of America, it’s a war, and it’s been going on the whole time, and nobody gets it, not even us. You have to do a graphic novel about it. This, at three motherfucking o’clock in the goddamn morning. I said I couldn’t wait to hear all about it tomorrow. Oh, I did. He claimed he was on the right track as far as the two kinds of economy people, land versus money. But not city people against us personally. It’s the ones in charge, like government or what have you. They were always on the side of the money-earning people, and down on the land people, due to various factors Tommy mentioned, monetize this, international banking that. The main one I could understand was that money-earning ones pay taxes. Whereas you can’t collect shit on what people grow and eat on the spot, or the work they swap with their neighbors. That’s like a percent of blood from a turnip. So, the ones in charge started cooking it into everybody’s brains to look down on the land people, saying we are an earlier stage of human, like” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “junior varsity or cavemen. Weird-shaped heads. Tommy was watching TV these days, and seeing finally how this shit is everywhere you look. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par, the long-termed war of trying to shame the land people into joining America. Meaning their version, city. TV being the slam book of all times, maybe everybody in the city was just going along with it, not really noticing the rudeness factors. Possibly to the extent of not getting why we are so fucking mad out here.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Emmy said Kent and June didn’t use weapons, just mouths, both parties packing serious heat in that department. Kent was a yeller, but mouthwise, June was an AR-15. Instant reload, engineered to kill.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “She said don’t ever be pregnant during the lead-up to Halloween because it will put you off candy corn for life. I told her thanks for the advice.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Any sport that’s not football around here is like vanilla. Why even eat that, if they’ve invented flavors.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Aunts standing close in the kitchen llike cigaretts in the pack, uncles splayed on furniture like butts in the ashtray.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “As a kid you just accept different worlds with different rules, even between some houses and others.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “People love to believe in danger, as long as it’s you in harm’s way,” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “One of those hot, rainy days where you feel like you’re breathing your own breath out of a paper bag.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays, I am down with that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not. How do I know? TV. The comedy channel is so funny it can make you want to go unlock the gun cabinet and kill yourself. Do they really think that along with being brainless and having sex with animals, we don’t even have cable?” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I took Mom’s word on that because you hear of such things, folks so godly as to pass around snakes, also passing around black eyes. If this is a new one on you, maybe you also think a dry county is a place where there’s no liquor to be found.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “know how that sounds. But you get twenty people in a big circle talking and chugging, and the effect is pretty good.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “was a guy called Copperhead. Supposedly he had the dark skin and light-green eyes of a Melungeon, and red hair that made you look twice.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “was a guy called Copperhead. Supposedly he had the dark skin and light-green eyes of a Melungeon, and red hair that made you look twice.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “One summer we did that for maybe a month, after a Nintendo Duck Hunt challenge where I accidentally let fly the controller gun and busted the screen. Maggot took credit for that deed so I wouldn’t get sent home and skinned alive. Mrs. Peggot pretended to take his word for it, even though she heard the whole thing. Probably everybody has had some golden patch of life like that, where everything was going to be okay thanks to the people that had your back, and sadly you wasted it, by being ticked off over some ignorant thing like a busted TV.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “don’t look for money to buy your life back,” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it’s easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing. Assuming you’ve ended up someplace you’re proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I could say was, Tommy, you know and I know, neither way is really better. In the long run it’s all just hustle. So our hustle is different. So what? And he said, I’m still figuring that part out.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “But I kept my mouth shut. It’s safer knowing more about people than they know about you.”
  • “Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “I was born to wish for more than I can have.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “First, I got myself born.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Keeping secrets from young ears only plants seeds in between them” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “and do not for the love of the Lord say you’re laying down if you mean lying down.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “A blown brain will reach for any sideshow to dodge the main event.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “No credit given for all the extra miles that take you nowhere.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “She sounded like a man, with that deep voice smokers get as their prize for their hundred millionth pack.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “life is a wild, impetuous ride. There could be good shit up ahead, don’t rule it out.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The body is the original asshole, it can put you on detention away from all pleasures, but still makes you write out the list of its needs, one hundred times. I will piss and shit. I will go hungry.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Storm in a shot glass type of thing. And Angus was the opposite. A whole ocean, dark and chill.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “God made us the butt of the joke universe.”― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it’s easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing.”― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comics.”― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “The women that loomed large in my life were all getting small.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
  • “Even now I probably think more than the normal about water, floating in it, just the color blue itself and how for the fish, that blue is the whole deal. Air and noise and people and our all-important hectic nonsense, a minor irritant if even that.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

Thank you for reading my list of Barbara Kingsolver‘s best Demon Copperhead quotes! Happy reading! ❤️