Purple Hibiscus Quotes
"Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère."
"Papa always sat in the front pew for Mass, at the end beside the middle aisle, with Mama, Jaja, and me sitting next to him."
"Papa, wearing a long, gray robe like the rest of the oblates, helped distribute ash every year."
"The colors of his face, the colors of condensed milk and a cut-open soursop, had not tanned at all in the fierce heat of seven Nigerian harmattans."
"Mama told me and Jaja; Papa did not tell us such things."
"Jaja stared at the missal on the table as though he were addressing it. 'The wafer gives me bad breath.'"
"Papa’s voice was low, very low. His face looked swollen already, with pus-tipped rashes spread across every inch, but it seemed to be swelling even more."
"The silence was broken only by the whir of the ceiling fan as it sliced through the still air."
"I developed a cough, and my cheeks burned the back of my hand."
"The bell-shaped yellow fruits hung lazily, drawing buzzing bees that bumped against my window’s netting."
"It was early rainy season, and the frangipani trees planted next to the walls already filled the yard with the sickly-sweet scent of their flowers."
"Papa said the walls had swayed his decision when I finished elementary school."
"The ochiri birds outside interrupted it. Every year, they arrived before the first rains came and nested on the avocado tree right outside the dining room."
"Jaja pushed his chair back. 'Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Papa. Thank you, Mama.'"
"I wished I could have gone over and helped her up, cleaned the red mud from her wrapper."
"The Reverend Sisters gave us our cards unsealed. I came second in my class."
"Papa liked it when the villagers made an effort to speak English around him."
"The compound was barely a quarter of the size of our backyard in Enugu."
"I watched a gray rooster walk into the shrine at the corner of the yard, where Papa-Nnukwu’s god was, where Papa said Jaja and I were never to go near."
"He had fallen from a palm tree in his hometown in the Niger Delta area, a few years ago while on vacation."
"You are like a fly blindly following a corpse into the grave!"
"We got here before noon; we left Nsukka really early and would have gotten here sooner if the car didn’t break down on the road, but it was near Ninth Mile, thank God, so it was easy finding a mechanic."
"The children can spend time together then."
"The father and the son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see? That is why Eugene can disregard me, because he thinks we are equal."
"University talk again. A husband crowns a woman’s life, Ifeoma. It is what they want."
"I will stop asking if you rose well in the morning."
"I will not ask my brother to bend over so that I can lick his buttocks to get these things."
"We are going straight to Heaven. Straight to Heaven."
"I will be very miserly with my new gas cylinders."
"I don’t understand why they fill our television with second-rate Mexican shows and ignore all the potential our people have."
"If some Big Man in Abuja has stolen the money, is the V.C. supposed to vomit money for Nsukka?"
"We do not say Mass in the name of grace like your father does."
"Kambili, get me some water from the tank outside."
"I thought of the fattened chickens Papa sometimes bought for our offertory procession."
"I wanted to say something, to remind this handsome priest that Papa wasn’t just Aunty Ifeoma’s brother or the Standard’s publisher, that he was my father."
"‘Did you?’ Aunty Ifeoma asked. ‘My brother, Eugene, almost single-handedly finances that church. Lovely church.’"
"He spoke so effortlessly, as if his mouth were a musical instrument that just let sound out when touched, when opened."
"Laughter always rang out in Aunty Ifeoma’s house."
"Arguments rose quickly and fell just as quickly."
"‘I have killed no one, I have taken no one’s land, I have not committed adultery.’"
"‘She behaves funny. Even Jaja is strange. Something is not right with them.’"
"‘I committed a sin against my own body once,’ he said."
"‘These pagan funerals are expensive. One fetish group will ask for a cow, then a witch doctor will demand a goat for some god of stone, then another cow for the hamlet and another for the umuada.'"
"‘I am telling Ade we should wait, sir,’ the other guest was saying. ‘Let him do the interview with Big Oga. We can do the Nwankiti Ogechi story later.’"
"They don’t want Nwankiti Ogechi to become an issue now. Simple! And you know what it means, it means they have wasted him!"
"Come, let us go to my study. My children are eating."
"Soldiers shot Nwankiti Ogechi in a bush in Minna. And then they poured acid on his body to melt his flesh off his bones, to kill him even when he was already dead."
"It was coming to this. I knew it would come to this."
"Do you think Godless men have any sense?"
"I should have made Ade hold that story. I should have protected him. I should have made him stop that story."
"Aunty, they won’t touch Papa. They know he has many foreign connections."
"Kambili will come to Nsukka when she leaves the hospital."
"This cannot go on. When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head."
"I did not heat the water, either, because I was afraid that the heating coil would make the rainwater lose the scent of the sky."
"I say these things to justify being fed by the church," Father Amadi said.
"‘Chiamaka’ says God is beautiful. ‘Chima’ says God knows best, ‘Chiebuka’ says God is the greatest. Don’t they all glorify God as much as ‘Paul’ and ‘Peter’ and ‘Simon’?"
"It is what happens when you are worthless in somebody’s eyes. We are like footballs that they can kick in any direction they want to."
"You are almost sixteen, Kambili. You are beautiful. You will find more love than you will need in a lifetime," he said.
"I think she had wanted to attend her sister’s wedding in America."
"I am. Do you know how many people they refuse? A woman next to me cried until I thought that blood would run down her cheeks."
"I should have taken care of Mama. Look how Obiora balances Aunty Ifeoma’s family on his head, and I am older than he is."
"Why did He have to murder his own son so we would be saved? Why didn’t He just go ahead and save us?"
"I no longer wonder if I chose St. Andrew’s church in Enugu as my new church because the priest there is a Blessed Way Missionary Father as Father Amadi is; I just go."
"We are like the adults walking past a crawling baby who tries to walk and falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults did not all crawl, once."
"We’ll plant new orange trees in Abba when we come back, and Jaja will plant purple hibiscus, too, and I’ll plant ixora so we can suck the juices of the flowers."