My favorite quotes

"And how can I invent my version of the story, without my crooked vision?" Adah - pg 493
"You have nothing to lose but your chains." Adah - pg. 495
"This is what I carried out of the Congo on my crooked little back. In oour seventeen months in Kilanga, thirty-one children died, including Ruth May. Why not Adah? I can think of no answer that exonerates me." Adah - pg 413
"By Anatole I was shattered and assembled, by way of Anatole I am delivered not out of my life but through it. Love changes Everything I never suspected it would be so. Requitted love, I should say, for I've loved my father fiercely my whole life, and it changed nothing." Leah - pg 399
"And no God, in any heart on this earth, was ever more on the look out for human failing." Leah - pg 393
"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 found only sorrow." Orleanna - pg 385
"Just for the moment it was as if she'd disappeared, and her voice was thrown into the trees." Leah - pg 363
"I see that plainly when I look at my parents. God doesn't need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves." Leah - pg 326
"Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punsihed. I'm warning you. When things go badly, you will blame yourself." Anatole - pg 309
"Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants." Anatole - pg 308
"That time Leah fed one to the ant lion, Jesus saw that. Now his friends are all coming back to eat us up." Ruth May - pg 303
"Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it mean the poisonwood tree. Praise the Lord, hallelujah, my friends! for Jesus will make you itch like nobody's business." Adah - pg 276
"If I die I will disappear and I know where I'll come back. I'll be right up there in the tree, same color, same everything. I will look down on you. But you won't see me." Ruth May - pg 273
"God's word, brought to you by a crew of romantic idealists in a harsh desert culture eons ago, followed by a chain of translators two thousand years long." Brother Fowles - 247
"Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to have to sink or swim." Leah - 244
"Bandu is my name. Nommo Bandu! It means the littlest one on the bottom. And it means the reason for everything. Nelson told me that." Ruth May - pg 238
"I knew it was only the shadow and the angle of the sun,  but still it's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known." Leah - 236
"Watching my father, I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room." Leah - pg 229
"Like Methuselah I cowered in my cage, and though my soul hankered after the mountain, I found like Methuselah, I had no wings." Orleanna - pg 201
"To his way of thinking they were unearned blessings, and furthermore each one drew God's attention anew to my having a vagina and his having a penis and the fact that we'd laid them near enough together to conceive a child." Orleanna - 198
"Oh mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, they King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms." Orleanna - pg 192

and I could go on but this is already far too long.