Purple Hibiscus Quotes

We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.

There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.

The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?

Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.

People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.

...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.

I was stained by failure.

She seemed so happy, so at peace, and I wondered how anybody around me could feel that way when liquid fire was raging inside me, when fear was mingling with hope and clutching itself around my ankles.

It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't.

I cannot control even the dreams that I have made.

Sometimes life begins when the marriage ends

There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman’s despair.

Eugene has to stop doing God's job. God is big enough to do his own job. If God will judge our father for choosing to follow the way of our ancestors, then let God do the judging, not Eugene.

Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you love.

Military men would always overthrow one another, because they could, because they were all power drunk.

There is so much that is still silent between Jaja and me. Perhaps we will talk more with time, or perhaps we never will be able to say it all, to clothe things in words, things that have long been naked.

Fear. I was familiar with fear, yet each time I felt it, it was never the same as the other times, as though it came in different flavors and colors.

We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't.

The white missionaries brought us their god,” Amaka was saying. “Which was the same color as them, worshiped in their language and packaged in the boxes they made. Now that we take their god back to them, shouldn’t we at least repackage it?

I often wondered why Sister Veronica needed to understand it, when it was simply the way things were done.

To call him humble was to make rudeness normal. Besides, humility had always seemed to him a specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did. It was honesty that he valued; he had always wished himself to be truly honest, and always feared that he was not

He spoke so effortlessly, as if his mouth were a musical instrument that just let sound out when touched, when opened.

There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time.

I had examined him that day, too, looking away when his eyes met mine, for signs of difference, of godlessness. I didn't see any, but I was sure they were there somewhere. They had to be.

I thought then of catechism classes, about chanting the answer to a question, an answer that was "because he has said it and his word is true." I could not remember the question.

I want to hold his hand, but I know he will shake it free. His eyes are too full of guilt to really see me, to see his reflection in my eyes, the reflection of my hero, the brother who tried always to protect me the best he could. He will never think that he did enough, and he will never understand that I do not think he should have done more.

As we drove back to Enugu, I laughed loudly,above Fela's stringent singing. I laughed because Nsukka's untarred roads coat cars with dust in the harmattan and with sticky mud in the rainy season. Because the tarred roads spring potholes like surprise presents and the air smells of hills and history and the sunlight scatters the sand and turns it into gold dust. Because Nsukka could free something deep inside your belly that would rise up to your throat and come out as freedom song. As laughter.(299)

Silence hangs over us, but it is a different kind of silence, one that lets me breathe. I have nightmares about the other kind, the silence of when Papa was alive.

Aokpe will always be special because it was the reason Kambili and Jaja first came to Nsukka.

One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad. The father and son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see?

His letters dwell on me. I carry them around because they are long and detailed, because they remind me of my worthiness, because they tug at my feelings. Some months ago, he wrote that he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary. He did not mention Papa—he hardly mentions Papa in his letters—but I knew what he meant, I understood that he was stirring what I was afraid to stir myself.

Perhaps we will talk more with time, or perhaps we never will be able to say it all, to clothe things in words, things that have long been naked.

To restore the dignity of man. Obiora was reading the plaque, too. He let out a short cackle and asked, “But when did man lose his dignity?

I meant to say I am sorry Papa broke your figurines, but the words that came out were, ‘I’m sorry your figurines broke, Mama.

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 etagere.(Opening page, 3)

Do you try to treat cancer sores or the cancer itself? We cannot afford to give pocket money to our children. We cannot afford to eat meat. We cannot afford bread. So your child steals and you turn to him in surprise? You must try to heal the cancer because the sores will keep coming back.

Mama had greeted him the traditional way that women were supposed to, bending low and offering him her back so that he would pat it with his fan made of the soft, straw-colored tail of an animal. Back home that night, Papa told Mama that it was sinful. You did not bow to another human being. It was an ungodly tradition, bowing to an Igwe. So, a few days later, when we went to see the bishop at Awka, I did not kneel to kiss his ring. I wanted to make Papa proud. But Papa yanked my ear in the car and said I did not have the spirit of discernment: the bishop was a man of God; the Igwe was merely a traditional ruler.

So you say. A woman with children and no husband, what is that?” “Me.

Papa said that the parish priest in Abba was not spiritual enough. That was the problem with our people, Papa told us, our priorities were wrong; we cared too much about huge church buildings and mighty statues. You would never see white people doing that.

- Os que estudaram vão embora, aqueles que têm potencial para consertar o que está errado. Eles deixam os fracos para trás. Os tiranos continuam reinando porque os fracos não conseguem resistir. Você não vê que é um círculo vicioso? Quem vai quebrar esse círculo?

We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.

Jaja’s defiance seemed to me now like Aunty Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.

I sat at my bedroom window after I changed; the cashew tree was so close I could reach out and pluck a leaf if it were not for the silver-colour crisscross of mosquito netting. The bell-shaped yellow fruits hung lazily, drawing buzzing bees that bumped against my window's netting. I heard Papa walk upstairs to his room for his afternoon siesta. I closed my eyes, sat still, waiting to hear him call Jaja, to hear Jaja go into his room. But after long, silent minutes, I opened my eyes and pressed my forehead against the window louvers to look outside.9

Do you want to go to Nsukka?’ I asked when we got to the landing. ‘Yes,’ he said, and his eyes said that he knew I did, too. And I could not find the words in our eye language to tell him how my throat tightened at the thought of five days without Papa’s voice, without his footsteps on the stairs.

They are always so quiet," he said, turning to Papa. "So quiet." "They are not like those loud children people are raising these days, with no home training and no fear of God," Papa said, and I was certain that it was pride that stretched Papa's lips and lightened his eyes. "Imagine what the Standard would be if we were all quiet." It was a joke. Ade Coker was laughing; so was his wife, Yewanda. But Papa did not laugh. Jaja and I turned and went back upstairs, silently.

عندما يشب حريق في منزل يتعين على من فيه الركض بعيداً قبل أن ينهار السقف على رأس من فيه.

Now the verandah was so silent I could hear the sound of the raindrops sliding off the leaves.

You lower your voice when you speak. You talk in whispers.

What?” There was a shadow clouding Papa’s eyes, a shadow that had been in Jaja’s eyes. Fear. It had left Jaja’s eyes and entered Papa’s.

Obiora asked, and I looked at him again. He was a bold, male version of what I could never have been at fourteen, what I still was not.

Defiance is like marijuana—it is not a bad thing when it is used right.” The

Às vezes a vida começa quando o casamento acaba.

Maybe Mama had realized that she would not need the figurines anymore; that when Papa threw the missal at Jaja, it was not just the figurines that came tumbling down, it was everything.

Amaka and Papa-Nnukwu spoke sometimes, their voices low, twining together. They understood each other, using the sparest words. Watching them, I felt a longing for something I knew I would never have.

We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know. “I have three assignments to do,

Ela parecia tão feliz, tão em paz, e eu me perguntei como alguém perto de mim podia se sentir assim, quando havia fogo líquido me queimando por dentro, quando o medo misturado à esperança se agarrava nos meus calcanhares.

O jokal Eugene tem de parar de fazer o trabalho de Deus. Deus é grande o suficiente para fazer seu próprio trabalho. Se Deus for julgar nosso pai por escolher o caminho de nossos ancestrais, então Ele que faça o julgamento, não Eugene.

The afternoon played across my mind as I got out of the car in front of the flat. I had smiled, run, laughed. My chest was filled with something like bath foam. Light. The lightness was so sweet I tasted it on my tongue, the sweetness of an overripe bright yellow cashew fruit.

Há alguns meses, ele escreveu dizendo que não queria que eu ficasse procurando os porquês, pois há certas coisas que acontecem e para as quais não podemos formular um porquê, para as quais os porquês simplesmente não existem e para as quais, talvez, eles não sejam necessários.

She's worked alongside him as they built their house on the vacant lot behind the sweet house and cultivated a small but fertile patch of cassava and sweet potatoes. Along the side wall of the house, a paradise of colors: tender pink hibiscus, fiery flamingo flowers, delicate purple orchids, and plump, juicy red protea.

Aunty Ifeoma was silent as she ladled the thick cocoyam paste into the soup pot; then she looked up and said Papa-Nnukwu was not a heathen but a traditionalist, that sometimes what was different was just as good as what was familiar, that when Papa-Nnukwu did his itu-nzu, his declaration of innocence, in the morning, it was the same as our saying the rosary.

Existem pessoas (...) que acham que nós não conseguimos governar nosso próprio país, pois nas poucas vezes em que tentamos nós falhamos, como se todos os outros que se governam hoje em dia tivessem acertado de primeira. É como dizer a um bebê que está engatinhando, tenta andar e cai de bunda no chão que ele deve permanecer no chão. Como se todos os adultos que passam por ele também não houvessem engatinhado um dia.

A paradisiacal lagoon lay below them. The water was an unbelievable, unreal turquoise, its surface so still that every feature of the bottom could be admired in magnified detail: colorful pebbles, bright red kelp, fish as pretty and colorful as the jungle birds. A waterfall on the far side fell softly from a height of at least twenty feet. A triple rainbow graced its frothy bottom. Large boulders stuck out of the water at seemingly random intervals, black and sun-warmed and extremely inviting, like they had been placed there on purpose by some ancient giant. And on these were the mermaids. Wendy gasped at their beauty. Their tails were all colors of the rainbow, somehow managing not to look tawdry or clownish. Deep royal blue, glittery emerald green, coral red, anemone purple. Slick and wet and as beautifully real as the salmon Wendy's father had once caught on holiday in Scotland. Shining and voluptuously alive. The mermaids were rather scandalously naked except for a few who wore carefully placed shells and starfish, although their hair did afford some measure of decorum as it trailed down their torsos. Their locks were long and thick and sinuous and mostly the same shades as their tails. Some had very tightly coiled curls, some had braids. Some had decorated their tresses with limpets and bright hibiscus flowers. Their "human" skins were familiar tones: dark brown to pale white, pink and beige and golden and everything in between. Their eyes were also familiar eye colors but strangely clear and flat. Either depthless or extremely shallow depending on how one stared. They sang, they brushed their hair, they played in the water. In short, they did everything mythical and magical mermaids were supposed to do, laughing and splashing as they did. "Oh!" Wendy whispered. "They're-" And then she stopped. Tinker Bell was giving her a funny look. An unhappy funny look. The mermaids were beautiful. Indescribably, perfectly beautiful. They glowed and were radiant and seemed to suck up every ray of sun and sparkle of water; Wendy found she had no interest looking anywhere else.

Amaka says people love priests because they want to compete with God, they simply want God as a rival. But we are not rivals, God and I, we are simply sharing. I no longer wonder if I have a right to love Father Amadi; I simply go ahead an love him. I no longer wonder if the checks I have been writing to the Missionary Fathers of the Blessed Way are bribes to God; I just go ahead and write them. I no longer Wonder if I chose St. Anderw´s church in Unugu as my new church because the priest there is a Blessed Way Missionary as Father Amadi is; I just go.

Aunty Ifeoma came the next day, in the evening, when the orange trees started to cast long, wavy shadows across the water fountain in the front yard. Her laughter floated upstairs into the living room, where I sat reading. I had not heard it in two years, but I would know that cackling, hearty sound anywhere. Aunty Ifeoma was as tall as Papa, with a well-proportioned body. She walked fast, like one who knew just where she was going and what she was going to do there. And she spoke the way she walked, as if to get as many words out of her mouth as she could in the shortest time.

the thought that she might be gone for a long time. Amaka and I said we would go with her. But Jaja said he would not go, then was stonily silent as if he dared anyone to ask him why. Obiora said he would stay back, too, with Chima. Aunty Ifeoma did not seem to mind. She smiled and said that since we didn’t have a male, she would ask Father Amadi if he wanted to accompany us. “I will turn into a bat if Father Amadi says yes,” Amaka said. But he did say yes. When Aunty Ifeoma hung up the phone after talking to him and said he would be coming with us, Amaka said, “It’s because of Kambili. He would never have come if not for Kambili.” Aunty Ifeoma drove us to the dusty village about two hours away. I sat in the back with Father Amadi, separated from him by the space in the middle. He and Amaka

من المفيد في بعض الأحيان أن يكون المرء جريئاً .. فالجرأة مثل الماريجوانا التي لا ضرر منها إذا استعملت على نحو صحيح.

ما كان يفعله الأب أمادي من تشجيع للصبية لتحقيق مستويات أعلى للوثب، هو نفسه تماماً، ما كانت تفعله العمة أفيوما من تشجيع لأبنائها على أن بمقدورهم تحقيق المزيد من التقدم، وعلى أنها تتوقع منهم المزيد من النجاح. لكن جاجا وأنا لم نكن نحقق تقدماً لأننا نثق بقدراتنا، وإنما لأننا كنا نخشي وينتابنا الذعر من عدم قدرتنا على تحقيق ما يتوقعه بابا منا من نجاح.

إن هناك أناساً يعتقدون أننا لسنا قادرين على حكم أنفسنا لأننا في بعض الأوقات القليلة حاولنا وفشلنا، وكأن الآخرين الذين يحكمون أنفسهم قد نجحوا منذ محاولتهم الأولى..

Papa looked around the room quickly, as if searching for proof that something had fallen from the high ceiling, something he had never thought would fall. He picked up the missal and flung it across the room, toward Jaja. It missed Jaja completely, but it hit the glass étagerè, which Mama polished often. It cracked the top shelf, swept the beige, finger-size ceramic figurines of ballet dancers in various contorted postures to the hard floor and then landed after them. Or rather it landed on their many pieces. It lay there, a huge leatherbound missal that contained the readings for all three cycles of the church year.

Eres como una mosca, que sigue el cadáver hasta la tumba

of this flat in two weeks. I know they are waiting to

There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.

People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It's exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.

He opened his eyes before many of our people did,

Nwunye m, things are tough, but we are not dying yet. I tell you all these things because it is you. With someone else, I would rub Vaseline on my hungry face until it shone.

It was only Sisi who had cried in the household, loud sobs that had quickly quieted in the face of our bewildered silence.

I turned to Jaja after she left and tried speaking with my eyes. But Jaja's eyes were blank, like a window with its shutter drawn across.

He stops chewing and stares at me silently with those eyes that have hardened a little every month he has spent here; now they look like the bark of a palm tree, unyielding. I even wonder if we ever really had an asusu anya, a language of the eyes, or if I imagined it all.

Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you loved. Have a love sip, he would say, and Jaja would go first. Then I would hold the cup with both hands and raise it to my lips. One sip. The tea was always too hot, always burned my tongue, and if lunch was something peppery, my raw tongue suffered. But it didn't matter, because I knew that when the tea burned my tongue, it burned Papa's love into me. But Papa didn't say, 'Have a love sip'; he didn't say anything as I watched him raise the cup to his lips.

You know there is a saying that it is not just the naked men in the market who are mad? Father Amadi asked. That streak of madness has returned and is disturbing you again, okwia? Obiora laughed, and so did Amaka, in that loud way it seemed only Father Amadi could get out of her. Spoken like the true missionary priest, Father, Amaka said. When people challenge you, label them mad.

You know there is a saying that it is not just the naked men in the market who are mad?'" Father Amadi asked. 'That streak of madness has returned and is disturbing you again, okwia?' Obiora laughed, and so did Amaka, in that loud way it seemed only Father Amadi could get out of her. 'Spoken like the true missionary priest, Father,' Amaka said. 'When people challenge you, label them mad.

You know there is a saying that it is not just the naked men in the market who are mad?' Father Amadi asked. 'That streak of madness has returned and is disturbing you again, okwia?' Obiora laughed, and so did Amaka, in that loud way it seemed only Father Amadi could get out of her. 'Spoken like the true missionary priest, Father,' Amaka said. 'When people challenge you, label them mad.

I had never considered the possibility that Papa would die, that Papa could die. He was different from Ade Coker, from all the other people they had killed. He had seemed immortal.

[Jaja] shifted on his seat and added, '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. I should have taken care of Mama.

I would focus on his lips, the movement and sometimes I forgot myself, sometimes I wanted to stay like that forever, listening to his voice, to the important things he said. It was the same way I felt when he smiled, his face breaking open like a coconut with brilliant white meat inside.

I didn’t know what else to do. This had never happened before in my entire life, never. The compound walls would crumble, I was sure, and squash the frangipani trees. The sky would cave in. The Persian rugs on the stretches of gleaming marble floor would shrink. Something would happen. But the only thing that happened was my choking. My body shook from the coughing. Papa and Mama rushed over. Papa thumped my back while Mama rubbed my shoulders and said, “O zugo. Stop coughing.

He was still smiling as I quietly turned and went back to the bedroom. I never smiled after we said the rosary back home. None of us did.

I wondered if I would have to confess that I had shared a room with a heathen. I paused then, in my meditation, to pray that Papa would never find out that Papa-Nnukwu had visited and that I had shared a room with him.

When Papa prayed for Papa-Nnukwu, he asked only that God convert him and save him from the raging fires of hell.

Nwunye m, sometimes life begins when marriage ends.” “You and your university talk. Is this what you tell your students?” Mama was smiling. “Seriously, yes. But they marry earlier and earlier these days. What is the use of a degree, they ask me, when we cannot find a job after graduation?” “At least somebody will take care of them when they marry.” “I don’t know who will take care of whom. Six girls in my first-year seminar class are married, their husbands visit in Mercedes and Lexus cars every weekend, their husbands buy them stereos and textbooks and refrigerators, and when they graduate, the husbands own them and their degrees. Don’t you see?” Mama shook her head. “University talk again. A husband crowns a woman’s life, Ifeoma. It is what they want.” “It is what they think they want. But how can I blame them? Look what this military tyrant is doing to our country.

loping, comfortable gait pulled my eyes and held them. I turned and dashed into the flat. I could see the front yard

So, do you plan to go to Aokpe?” Father Amadi asked. “I was not really planning to. But I suppose we will have to go now, I will find out the next apparition date.” “People are making this whole apparition thing up. Didn’t they say Our Lady was appearing at Bishop Shanahan Hospital the other time? And then that she was appearing in Transekulu?” Obiora asked. “Aokpe is different. It has all the signs of Lourdes,” Amaka said. “Besides, it’s about time Our Lady came to Africa. Don’t you wonder how come she always appears in Europe? She was from the Middle East, after all.” “What is she now, the Political Virgin?” Obiora asked, and I looked at him again. He was a bold, male version of what I could never have been at fourteen, what I still was not. Father Amadi laughed. “But she’s appeared in Egypt, Amaka. At least people flocked there, like they are flocking to Aokpe now. O bugodi, like migrating locusts.” “You don’t sound like you believe, Father.” Amaka was watching him. “I don’t believe we have to go to Aokpe or anywhere else to find her. She is here, she is within us, leading us to her Son.” He spoke so effortlessly, as if his mouth were a musical instrument that just let sound out when touched, when opened.

Afterwards, Ada turned slow cartwheels on the terrace, watching the world change kaleidoscopically from purple to orange as the queen's crepe myrtles took turns with the hibiscus. The gardener was sweeping the lawn and his helper was cleaning down the curved cane chairs on the wide verandah. Ordinarily, cartwheeling was one of Ada's favorite things to do, but this afternoon her heart wasn't in it. Rather than enjoying the way the world spun around her, she felt dizzy, even queasy. After a time, she sat instead on the edge of the verandah near the spider lilies.

Ada tore open the package to find a small black leather book inside. Between its covers were no words, but instead page after page of pressed flowers: orange hibiscus, mauve Queen's crepe myrtle, purple passionflower, white spider lilies, red powder puffs. All of them, Ada knew, had come from her very own garden, and in an instant she was back in Bombay. She could feel the sultry air on her face, smell the heady fragrance of summer, hear the songs of prayer as the sun set over the ocean.

Eu sorrira, correra, rira. Meu peito estava repleto de alguma coisa parecida com espuma de banho. Leve. A leveza era tão doce que eu podia sentir seu gosto na língua, tinha a doçura de um caju maduro, amarelo-vivo.

Com freqüência fazíamos perguntas cujas respostas já sabíamos. Talvez fizéssemos isso para não precisarmos formular as outras perguntas, aquelas cujas respostas não queríamos saber.

Конечно, там не бывает отключения энергии, а из крана бежит не только холодная, но и горячая вода, но они больше не смеются. У них нет на это времени, потому что они почти не видят друг друга.

tradition of the coming-of-age novel’. With its ‘rich descriptions of physical

há certas coisas que acontecem e para as quais não podemos formular um porquê, para as quais os porquês simplesmente não existem e para as quais, talvez, eles não sejam necessários