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Purple Hibiscus QUOTES

Purple Hibiscus QUOTES

1 " 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? "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

2 " Sometimes life begins when the marriage ends "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

3 " 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. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

4 " 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. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

5 " 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. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

6 " 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. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

7 " 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. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

8 " 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. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

9 " 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. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

10 " 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. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

11 " ...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. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

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

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

13 " I was stained by failure. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

14 " 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 "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

15 " 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. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

16 " I cannot control even the dreams that I have made. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

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

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

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

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

19 " 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? "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus

20 " 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) "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Purple Hibiscus