1. “Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.”
2. “‘You make it sound like she’s an accessory he needs to go with his outfit.’”
3. “Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.”
4. “To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.”
5. “Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.”
6. “For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.”
7. “I am telling you what I’m telling you. 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.”
8. “He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”
9. “But I’ll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.”
10. “Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress.”
11. “Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.”
12. “If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites.”
13. “That’s how it always is with us. Step too far one way or the other and you’ve got on your sister’s toes.”
14. “Take your place, then. Look at what happened from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone. Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the shore, spying on the jungle’s edge through their fitted brass lenses. Imagine that by some miracle of dread or reverence they lowered their spyglasses, turned, set their riggings, sailed on. Imagine all who came after doing the same. What would that Africa be now? All I can think of is the other okapi, the one they used to believe in. A unicorn that could look you in the eye.”
15. “My father says a girl who fails to marry is veering from God’s plan – that’s what he’s got against college…”
16. “Mother, you had no life of your own.”
17. “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.”
18. “I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floors, so I did what I could.”
19. “With no men around, everyone was surprisingly lighthearted.”
20. “To live is to be marked. To”
21. “Nobody had planted these flowers, I felt sure, nor harvested them either; these were works that the Lord had gone ahead and finished on His own. He must have lacked faith in mankind’s follow-through capabilities, on the day he created flowers.”
22. “A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.”
23. “Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion.”
24. “Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.”
25. “Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.”
26. “I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which… is at home at the moment.”
27. “What a revelation, that I could carry my own parcel like any woman here!”
28. “Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.”
29. “Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past.”
30. “I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.”
31. “That is surely childhood’s end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: “Nobody else is going to do this.”
32. “I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year.”
33. “I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them”
34. “Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!.”
35. “Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.”
36. “This Forest eats itself and lives forever.”
37. “Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.”
38. “I went on foot because I still had feet to carry me.”
39. “When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday…”
40. “I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires.”
41. “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!”
42. “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 the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.”
43. “I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.”
44. “If the Lord hasn’t got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that’s his business.”
45. “Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all, he declared to the sky, squinting up at God and demanding justice. I held him in my arms at night and saw parts of his soul turn to ash. Then I saw him reborn, with a stone in place of his heart. Nathan would accept no more compromises.”
46. “I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”
47. “As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.”
48. “The loss of a life: unwelcome. Immoral? I don’t know.”
49. “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…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.”
50. “There are Christians and then there are Christians.”
51. “I prefer to remain anomalous.”
52. “We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it was someone’s real life, and for once that someone wasn’t just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was our life, the only one we were going to have.”
53. “Don’t dare presume there’s shame in the lot of a woman who carries on.”
54. “I’ll never get over my grappling for balance, never stop believing life is going to be fair, the minute we can clear up all these mistakes of the temporarily misguided.”
55. “God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.”
56. “Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same.”
57. “We Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.”
58. “So much depends on the tone of voice.”
59. “But I’ve swallowed my pride before, that’s for sure. I’m practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.”
60. “Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
61. “Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.”
62. “The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.”
63. “God works, as is very well known, in mysterious ways. There is just nothing you can name that He won’t do, now and then.”
64. “here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight,”
65. “Am I the only one getting shocked to smithereens here?”
66. “But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.”
67. “Take one trip overland here and you’ll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream.”
68. “Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story”
69. “I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose.”
70. “Alive, nobody matters much in the long run. But dead, some men matter more than others.”
71. “Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.”
72. “Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.”
73. “When the spirit passed through him he groaned, throwing body and soul into his weekly purge. The “Amen enema”, as I call it. My palindrome for the Reverend.”
74. “This is what it means to be very slow: every story you would like to tell has already ended before you can open your mouth.”
75. “Even a language won‘t stand still.”
76. “You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.”
77. “It’s just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.”
78. “The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.”
79. “Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.”
80. “But I don’t happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You’ll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you’ll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.”
81. “Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I’ve only found sorrow.”
82. “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.”
83. “Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, “My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.”
84. “The rusted embroidery hoops left an unsightly orange ring on the linen that may have damaged my prospects for good.”
85. “He made a habit of prattling at the top of his lungs through Sunday dinners at our house. Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.”
86. “Which makes you wonder, are they really speaking real words or do little kids just start out naturally understanding each other before the prime of life sets in?”
87. “Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.”
88. “Being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.”
89. “To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.”
90. “Until that moment I’d always beloved i could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened”
91. “Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with a clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune.”
92. “Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you’ll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they’ve already seen most of what there is. Married eyes.”
93. “Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.”
94. “Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.”
95. “…why, he very nearly almost looked handsome. If you could ignore the telltale signs that he is a certified creep.”
96. “We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now? Ask the children. Look at what they grew up to be. We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away.”
97. “You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.”
98. “The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.”
99. “It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.”
100. “What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That’s pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There’s the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace.”
101. “I believe I’m very happy.”
102. “There’s a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true but you haven’t told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet.”
103. ″‘When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day without a lot of dubious middle managers.‘”
104. “The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we’d like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you. We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right.”
105. “When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.”
106. “I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them…”
107. “Sometimes I tell her: Mommy Mommy. I just say that. Father isn’t listening so I can say it. Her real name is Mother and Misrus Price but her secret name to me is Mommy Mommy. He went away on the airplane and I said, “Mama, I hope he never comes back.” We cried then.”
108. “There is no stepping in the same river twice. So say the Greek philosophers, and the crocodiles make sure.”
109. “Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,” he still loves to say, as often as possible. “It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.”
110. “Since no one can read, every candidate is designated by a symbol. Wisely these men choose to represent themselves with useful things – knife, bottle, matches, cooking pot.”
111. “A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after–oh, that’ s love by a different name.”
112. “There’s nothing like living as a refugee in one’s own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist.”
113. “Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.”
114. “When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up.”
115. “She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.”
116. “Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.”
117. “Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.”
118. “But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules don’t quite apply to us, nor protect us either. What do a girl’s bravery and righteousness count for, unless she is also pretty? Just try being the smartest and most Christian seventh-grade girl in Bethlehem, Georgia. Your classmates will smirk and call you a square. Call you worse, if you’re Adah.”
119. “I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.”
120. “Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.”
121. “Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies.”
122. “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.”
123. “He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.”
124. “No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.”
125. “Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.”
