Quotes I like from the books I'm reading

This acts as a personal archive of quotes I like as I read them. Maybe you guys will enjoy some of them too. My Primary (photo) Blog is another-personhasclaimedthis-url.tumblr.com

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When I go with them to the grocery, they are boggled and frightened and secretly scornful, I think. Of course they are... "What is that, Aunt Adah? And that?" their Pascal asks in his wide-eyed way, pointing through the aisles: a pink jar of cream for removing hair, a can of fragrance to spray on the carpet, stacks of lidded containers the same size as the jars we throw away each day. "They're things a person doesn't really need." "But, Aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doesn't really need?" I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to a child of another world.

Adah Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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Over the next weeks we heard a hundred more times about the whites killed by Simbas in Stanleyville. In three languages: Radio France, the BBC, and Mobutu's Lingala newscasts frome Leopoldville. The news was all one. Those thirty white people, rest their souls, have purchased an all-oout invasion against the pro-Independents. How many Congolese were killed by the Belgians and labor and starvation, by the special police, and now by the UN soldiers, we will never know. They'll go uncounted. Or count for nothing, if that is possible.

Leah Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. For what? I could not think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places with and without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absence? Then I stared for a while at a traffic light, which was suspended elaborately on wires above the intersection. I couldn't look at the cars themselves. My brain was roaring from all the color and orchestrated metal movement... The world seemed crowded and empty at the same time, devoid of smells, and extremely bright. I continued to stare at the traffic light, which glowed red. Suddenly a green arrow popped on, pointing left, and the row of cars like obedient animals all went left. I laughed out loud.

Adah Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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We thought we could freeze time for just one more minute, and one more after that. That if none of us confessed it, we could hold back the curse that was going to be our history.

Rachel Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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I didn't cry at first, and then, I don't know why, but I fell apart when I thought of Mother in bed sleeping. Mother's dark hair would be all askew on the pillow and her face sweet and quiet. Her whole body just not knowing yet. Her body that had carried and given birth to Ruth May last of all. Mother asleep in her nightgown, still believing she had four living daughters. Now we were going to put one foot in front of the other, walk to the back door, go in the house, stand beside our parents' bed, wake up Mother, say to the the words Ruth May, say the word dead. Tell her, Mother wake up!

Rachel Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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Because I could not stop for Death-- He kindly stopped for me. I was not present at Ruth May's birth but I have seen it now, because I saw each step of it played out in reverse at the end of her life. The closing parenthesis, at the end of the palindrome that was Ruth May. Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby's first breath. That last howling scream, exactly like the first, and then at the end a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world.

Adah Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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It's a very odd thing to recall, that we all looked up. Not one of us looked at Ruth May. I can't say that Ruth May was even there with us, in that instant. Just for the moment it was as if she'd disappeared, and her voice was thrown into the trees. Then she returned to us, but all that was left of her was an awful silence. The voiceless empty skin of my baby sister sitting quietly on the ground, hugging herself.

Leah Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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"A small blunt head emerged and swiveled to face us. Very slowly it split itself wide, showing the bright blue inside of its mouth, two bare fangs. A tongue, delicately licking the air. Green mamba, mistress of camouflage, agility, aggressiveness, and speed.

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

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It should have been the most glorious day in our village, but instead it all came crashing down. Fifty years from now if I'm still living I will look back on that one afternoon, and the morning that followed. Even then I swear I'll know it for what it was: the most terrible day of our lives. After the hunt ended there was supposed to be a celebration, but before the old men could drag their drums out under the tree and get the dancing started, it had already turned into a melee of screaming and fighting. Men we had known as kindly, generous fathers suddenly became strangers with clenched fists and wide eyes, shouting into each other's faces... There should have been more than enough for ever family. But as we circled to receive our share of providence, the fat flanks of the magnificent beasts we'd stalked on the hill shrank to parched sinew, the gristle of drought-starved carcasses. Abundance disappeared before our eyes. Where there was plenty, we suddenly saw not enough.

Leah Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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If you even think you can picture how awful it was, you are wrong. Lambs to the slaughter. We were, or the animals were, I don't even know who I feel sorry for the most... Everybody jumped for joy. Me too at first, for I was thinking, Hooray, a halfway decent meal at last. If I eat one egg omelet I think I'll turn over easy and cluck. But by the end of the day everybody was smeared with blood, like creepy, happy ghouls, and I couldn't bear to be one of them myself. Everything changed. The villagers transformed into brutish creatures before my very eyes, with their hungry mouths gaping wide. My own sister Leah got down on her knees and eagerly skinned a poor little antelope, started out by slitting its belly and peeling back the skin over its back with horrible ripping sounds. She and Nelson hunkered down side by siding, using a knife and even their teeth to do it.

Rachel Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

Adah Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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The fire ran ahead at times, and sometimes flagged, as if growing tired like the rest of us. The heat was unspeakable. I imagined the taste of water. As the ring burned smaller we suddenly caught sight of its other side, the red-orange tongues and black ash closing in. The looming shapes of animals inside: antelopes, bushbucks, broadheaded warthogs with warthog children running behind them. A troop of baboons ran with arched tails flying as they zigzagged, not yet understanding their entrapment. Thousands of insects beat the air to a pulpy soup of animal panic. Birds hit the wall of fire and lit like bottle rockets. When it seemed there was no more air, no more hope, the animals began to run out through the fire into the open, where spears and arrows waited. The antelopes did not leap gracefully as I imagined they would; they wheeled like spooked horses around the inside of the circle, then suddenly veered out as if by accident or blindness. Seeing their companions shot in the neck with arrows, they heeled in panic, sometimes turning back to the flames but mostly running straight on, straight toward people and death. A small spotted antelope fell down very near me and presented me with the strange, singular gift of its death. I watched its heaving sides slowly come to rest, as if it had finally caught its breath. Dark blood leaked from its delicate black mouth onto the charred ground. On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals. The lion kills the baboon; the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love. The hungry antelope's shadow passes over the startled grass. And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creature that would like to kill us first. And swallow quinine pills. The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

Adah Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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I've surmised this scene, assembled it piece by piece over many years from the things I read, when it all began to come out. I try to imagine these men and their game, for it helps place my own regrettable acts on a broader field, where they seem smaller. What trivial thing was I doing while they divided the map beneath my feet? Who was the woman walking by with the roasted corn? Might she have been some distant kin of someone I haggled with on market days? How is it that neither of us knew the ways of the world for so long? Fifteen years after Independence, in 1975, a group of Senators called the Church Committee took it upon themselves to look onto the secret operations that had been brought to bear on the Congo. The world rocked with surprise. The Church Committee found notes from secret meetings of the National Security Council and President Eisenhower. In their locked room, these men had put their heads together and proclaimed Patrice Lumumba a danger to the safety of the world. The same Patrice Lumumba, mind you, who washed his face each morning from a dented tin bowl, relieved himself in a carefully chosen bush, and went out to seek the faces of his nation. Imagine if he could have heard those words-- dangerous to the safety of the world!-- from a roomful of white men who held in their manicured hands the disposition of armies and atomic bombs, the power to extinguish every life on earth.

Orleanna Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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"You're the only one here who'll even talk to us, Anatole! Nobody else cares about us, Anatole!" "Tata Boanda is carrying your mother and sister in his boat. Tata Lekulu is rowing his boat with leaves stuffed in his ears while your father lectures him on loving the Lord. Nevertheless, Tata Lekulu is carrying him to safety. Did you know, Mama Mwanza sometimes puts eggs from her own chickens under your hens when you aren't looking? How can you say no one cares about you?" "Mama Mwanza does that? How do you know?" He didn't say. I was stupid not to have figured it out. Nelson sometimes found oranges and manioc and even meat in our kitchen house when nothing was there the night before. I suppose we believed so hard in God's providence that we just accepted miracles in our favor.

Leah Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky."

Anatole, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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That night I could still wonder why she did not help me. Live was I ere I saw evil. Now I do not wonder at all. That night marks my life's dark center, the moment when growing up ended and the long downward slope toward death began. The wonder to me now is that I thought myself worth saving. But I did. I did, oho, did I! I reached out and clung for life with my good left hand like a claw, grasping at moving legs to raise myself from the dirt. Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom.

Adah Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

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At night the lizards run up the walls and upside down over the bed looking down at me. They stick up there with their toes. Mice, too. They can talk to me... The lizards make a sound like a bird at night. In the dreams that I get to watch I can catch the lizards and they're my pets. They stay right in my hand and don't run off. When I wake up I don't have them anymore and I'm sad. So I don't wake up if I don't have to.

Ruth May Price, The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)