The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

• One has only a life of one's own.
• What is the conqueror's wife, if not a conquest herself?
• Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same.
• The Lord helps those who help themselves.
• All grown-ups aren't equally immune to damage.
• Bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living, not a disgrace.
• He doesn't deliver us out of our hardships but through them.
• Sometimes I pray to remember, other times I pray to forget. It makes no difference.
• I held him in my arms at night and saw parts of his soul turn to ash. Then I saw him reborn, with a stone in place of his heart.
• Sometimes you need to scare a person a little for her own good.
• The game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.
• Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.
• If your brother is going to steal your hen, save your honor and give it to him first.
• Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn?
• Oh mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
• Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace.
• Whenever you have plenty of something, you have to share it with the fyata (no money).
• Sometimes you just want to lay on down and look at the whole world sideways.
• If everyone lived to be old, then old age would not be such a treasure.
• If your belly was empty and you saw whole baskets of bread on the other side of a window, would you continue waiting patiently? Or would you throw a rock?
• It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
• You can't keep a new fire low; it must grow or die.
• When someone has much more than he can use, it's very reasonable to expect he will not keep it all himself.
• When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up.
• Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.
• If you look hard enough you can always see reasons, but you'll go crazy if you think it's all punishment for your sins. God doesn't need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
• The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again.
• If there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.
• Sometimes you just have to save your neck and work out the details later. Like that little book said: Stick out your elbows, pick up your feet, and float along with the crowd! The last thing you want to do is get trampled to death.
• When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up.
• Sometimes I feel like the only person for miles around who hasn't given up.
• For everything that has ever come into my mind, there is already a book written about it.
• Marriage is one long fit of compromise, deep and wide. There is always one agenda swallowing another, a squeaky wheel crying out.
• You just can't assume that what's right or wrong for us is the same as what was right or wrong for them.
• We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.
• If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles.
• The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
• Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.
• 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.
• Sometimes life doesn't give you all that many chances at being good.
• You choose your path and stick to it and suffer your consequences.
• You don't have to like it but you sure have to admit it's out there. You have your way of thinking and it has its, and never the train ye shall meet! You just don't let it influence your mind. If there's ugly things going on out there, well, you put a good stout lock on your door and check it twice before you go to sleep. You focus on getting your own little place set up perfect. Other people's worries do not necessarily have to drag you down.
• We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions.
• Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

3/18/2011--1 a.m.