"The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else"
About this Quote
The subtext is political without waving a flag. Kingsolver’s fiction lives among the displaced: people pushed by economics, ecology, family fracture, the long American habit of mobility marketed as freedom. “You carry that in your brains and in your hands” is a corrective to narratives that treat uprooting as total loss. Knowledge and craft are portrayed as a kind of citizenship you can’t have foreclosed. It’s also a rebuke to a softer form of dispossession: the belief that your real life is always elsewhere, waiting in a different town, a better relationship, the next reinvention.
The final contrast lands like a diagnosis. Carrying your life wherever you go can be resilience; “always go looking for it somewhere else” is restlessness dressed up as aspiration. Kingsolver is warning against the addictive hope of relocation-as-salvation, the consumer logic applied to identity. The quote works because it’s tender about endurance but unsentimental about escape: it insists that home is something you practice, not something you chase.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reinvention |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Kingsolver, Barbara. (2026, January 17). The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-important-thing-isnt-the-house-its-the-36178/
Chicago Style
Kingsolver, Barbara. "The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-important-thing-isnt-the-house-its-the-36178/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-important-thing-isnt-the-house-its-the-36178/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.
