THE POISONWOOD BIBLE
By: Barbara Kingsolver
"Caterpillars one after another I laid on my tongue, their char crisp bristle taste a sweet momentary salve to a body aching for protein. Hunger of the body is altogther different from the shallow daily hunger of the belly. Thsoe who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not." (413)
"With their bellies underslung with precious clinging babies, they loped behind the heavy maned males, who would try to save themselves, but on reaching the curtain of flame where the others passed through, they drew up short. Crouched low. Understanding no choice but to burn with their children." (415)
"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... And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first..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." (415-416)
"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. After the howl, wide-eyed silence without breath." (435-436)
"Was that really what mattered to him right now - the condition of Ruth May's soul? Mother ignored him, but I studied his face in the bright morning light. His blue eyes with their left-sided squint, weakened by war, had a vacant look. His large, reddish ears repelled me. My father was a simple, ugly man... Now he seemed narrow-witted and without particular dreams." (439)
"We were all cut down together by the knife of our own hope, for if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest. In our family, the last was first. I woudl like to believe she got what she wanted. I ground my knees in the dust and shook and sobbed and opened my mouth to cry out loud. I crossed my arms over my chest and held on to my own shoulders, thinkin of Ruth May's sharp, skinny shoulder blades under her little white shirt. Thinking of ant lions and "Mother May I." Recalling her strange, transfixed shadow the last time I pushed her in the swing. The sounds of our voices rose up through the tree branches in the sky, but Ruth May did not." (443)
"Maybe you still can't understand why I stayed so long. I've nearly finished with my side of the story, and still I feel what you'll name my sin: Complicity? Loyalty? Stupefaction? How can you tell the difference? Is my sin a failure of virtue, or of competence? I know Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floor, so I did what I could... But look at old women and bear in mind we are another country. We married with sipmle hopes: enough to eat and children who might outlive us.. It didn't occur to me to leave Nathan on account of unhappiness..." (456-457)
"I moved and he stood still. But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it's wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them. The Pharaoh died, says Exodus and the children of Israel sighed by reason of their bondage. Chains rattle, rivers toll, animals startle and bolt, forests inspire and expand, babies stretch open-mouthed from the womb, new seedlings arch their necks and creep forward into the light... They're desperate to hang on. But they can't." (457)
"My little beast, my eyes, my favorite stolen egg. 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." - Orleanna Price (458, Kingsolver)
"Only once I realized I was looking around for Ruth May, wondering whether she was warm enough or needed my extra shirt. Then I thought with astonishment, Why, Ruth May is no longer with us! It seemd very simple. We were walking along this road, and she wasn't with us." (463)
Adah Price: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant, says my friend Emily Dickinson. And really what choice do I have? I am a crooked little person, obsessed with balance." (482)
"The astonishing, the bereft, bizarre, and homeless (for we could no longer live in a parsonage without a parson), tainted by darkest Africa and probably heathen, Orleanna and Adah, who have slunk back to town without their man, like a pair of rabid dalmations staggering home with their fire engine." (483)
"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, and the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. For what?I could not quite 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 places without them?" (487)
"Alive one moment, dead the next, because that is how my divided brain divined the world. There was room in Adah for nought but pure love and pure hate. Such a life is satisfying and deeply uncomplicated." (490-491)
"The nuns spied me out there and told me I'm going to wear away their foundation. They are use to gunfire and leprosy but not true love." (498)
"'If God is really taking a hand in things,' I informed Therese, 'he is bitterly mocking the hope of brotherly love. He is making sure that color will matter forever.'" (501)
"Crying with my mouth open, howling for Ruth May and the useless waste of our mistakes and all that's going to happen now, everyone already dead and not yet dead, known or unknown to me, every Congolese child with no hope. I felt myself falling apart - that by morning I might be just bones melting into the modly soil of the sisters' vegetable garden." (502-503)
Leah Price Ngemba: "It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood that their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me." (520)
"If I can't yet mourn a million who left this world in a single day, I'll start with one, and move from there. I dont' have much left of my childhood beliefs I can love or trust, but I still know what justice is. As long as I'm carrying Ruth May piggyback through my days, with her voice in my ear, I'll have her with me." (521)
"I was unprepared to accept that my whole sense of Adah was founded on misunderstanding between my body and my brain." (521)
Adah Price: "Mother says I never practiced anything but always watched Leah, letting her make the mistakes for both of us, until I was ready to do it myself with acceptable precision. Mother is kind to me, probably because I've stayed nearer at hand than her other children. But I disagree. I made plenty of my own mistakes. I just made them on the inside." (523)
"'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 delibrate 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. We leave that to Anatole, for he sees it all clearly in an instant. He laughs aloud at the nearly naked women on giant billboards, and befriends the bums who inhabit the street corners of Atlanta, asking them detailed questions about where they sleep and how they kill their food. The answers are interesting. You might be surprised to know howm any pigeons roosting on the eaves of Atlanta's Public Library have ended up roasting over fires in Grant Park." (523-524)
"Anatole and I inhabit the same atmosphere of solitude. The difference between us is he would give up his right arm and leg for Leah, whereas I already did. Will I lose myself entirely if I lose my limp? How can I reasonably survive beyond the death of Ruth May and all those children? Will salvation be the death of me?" (524-525)
Adah Price: "Evil peels no eye on sleep. Live! Die." (525)
"She (Mother) marches for civil rihts... She is very good at it, and impervious to danger. She came to my apartment one night, having walked nearly a mile through tear gas, so that I could check her eyes for damage to the cornea. Her eyes were not even red. I think bullets would pass right through her." (525)
"It crosses my mind that I may need a religion. Although Mother has one now, and she still suffers. I belive she talks to Ruth May more or less constantly, begging forgiveness when no one is around. Leah has one: her religion is the suffering. Rachel doesn't, and she is plainly the happiest of us all. Though it coudl be argued that she is, herself, her own brand of goddess." (525)
"..I watched over three tiny creatures whose lungs struggled like the flat, useless wings of butterflies prematurely emerged. Triplets. I considered Nelson's point of view of what ought to be done with twins, and the dreadful consequences of ignoring that tradition. What we had here was worse: a triple calamity fallen on the house of these poor parents....While the machines hummed softly in our hospital and white-soled shoes whispered up and down the halls, a catastrophe was roaring down upon this child of a mother. This is her Christmas gift. She will be indentured forever. Never again will her life be free of travail and disappointment in her three blind mice. She may cut off their tails with a carving knife, this husbandless wife, whose school friends are still promenading through their girlhoods. Who is to say that she should not have run to the forest with her hair and umbilical cords flying, and knelt to deposit each of these three at hte base of its own pine tree? Who will argue that my drips and incubators are really the wiser plan? Who could blame Mother if she had chosen to leave me so?" (526)
"It's as if history can be no more than a mirror tipped up to show each of us exactly what we already knew." (533)
Leah: "Suddenly she reported with a blank face that she was leaving school. 'Oh, Elevee, you can't,' I said. She's a smart little girl, though this guarantees nothing, of course.
Elisabet simply asked her, 'Why?'
'To work at night with Mother,' she said flatly. Meaning, to work as a prostitute.
'How old are you?' I demanded angrily. 'Eleven? Ten? This is a crime, Elevee, you're a child! There are laws to protect you from that kind of work. It's horrible, you don't know. You'll be scared and hurt and could get terribly sick.
Elisabet looked at me with dismay. 'Mondele, don't frighten her. They have to have money.'... I just stared at Elevee, my son's little friend with skinned knees and her two braids sticking out like handlebars: a prostitute. It dawned on me that her childishness would increase her value, for a while anyway. That made me want to scream.. I survive here on outrage. Naturally I would. I grew up with my teeth clamped on a faith in the big white man in power - God, the President, I don't care who he is, he'd serve justice. Whereas no one here has ever had the faintest cause for such delusions. Sometimes I feel like the only perosn for miels around who hasn't give up." (535-536)
"Survival is a continuous negotiation, as you have to barter covertly for every service the government pretends to provide, but actually doesn't." (538)
"I've heard foreign visitors complain that the Congolese are greedy, naive, and inefficient. They have no idea. The Congolese are skilled at survival and perceptive beyond belief, or else dead at any early age. Those are the choices." (539)
"It's a grief to see the best of Zairean genius and diplomacy spent on bare survival, while fortunes in diamonds and cobalt are slipped daily out from under our feet. 'This is not a poor nation,' I remind my sons till they hear it in their sleep. 'It is only a nation of poor.'" (540)
"God grants us long enough lives to punish ourselves." (543)
"... well intentioned white people spoke to my trilingual children (they fluently interchange French, Lingala, and English, with a slight accent in each) by assaultying them with broad, loud baby talk. Anatole's students did essentially the same, displaying a constant impulse to educate him with democracy and human rights - arrogant sophomores! With no notion of what their country is doing to his." (559)
"And I have no idea how to be kind to myself. Living, as a general enterprise, seems unkind beyond belief." (562)
"Marriage is one long fit of compromise, deep and wide. There is always one agenda swallowing another, a squeaky wheel crying out." (565)
"By lamplight when the boys are asleep, I write short letters to Anatole, reporting briefly on the boys and our health, and long lettesr to Adah about how I'm really faring. Neither of them will ever see my letters, probably, but it's the writing I need, the pouring out. I tell Adah my sorrows. I get dramatic. It's probably best that these words will end up suffocating in a pile, undelivered." (566)
"So this will be the end." (Second Maccabees 13:4) (584)
"To live is to change, to die a hundred deaths." (593)
"Maybe 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... I anticipate rewards for goodness, and wait for the ax of punishment to fall upon evil, in spite of the years I"ve rocked in this cradle of rewarded evils and murdered goodness. Just when I start to feel jaded to life as it is, I'll suddenly wake up in a fever, look out at the world, and gasp at how much has gone wrong that I need to fix." (605)
"But in my dreams, I still have hope, and in life, no safe retreat. If I have to hop all the way on one foot, damn it, I'll find a place I can claim as home." (607)
"My colleagues accuse me of cynicism, but I am simply a victim of poetry." (634)
"Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization." (637)
"We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions." (638)
"Listen: beign dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger." (643)
"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." (649)
Notes (by Emily): I think what Kingsolver was doing with this book, was not only describing a journey through Africa by the Price family, and the effects that resulted from their mission, but also she is using Africa as a comparison to our society today. Africa is a place that has been called 'uncivilized', 'natural', and untainted, or disadvantaged from the lack, of technology. Kingsolver is using Africa has a parallel to society in general to write a story about the world, not just about Africa. Whether their natural state is good or bad, there are always throwbacks to every good, just as there is any society. This is not the story of four women (Leah, Orleanna, Rachel, and Adah) surviving Africa, it is the story of four women surviving life itself. Look at, for example, the italicized quote on page 605. This quote is stated by Leah about the state in Africa. However, the truth is that it applies to every country, every place, and every society in the world. Poisonwood Bible is a story of extremities written to draw parallels and conclusions from our own worlds.