I want you back.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
* "..when I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book."
* "I was seventeen, bursting utterly with happiness."
* "Oh, it's a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it's easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that's nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us. Had I not married a preacher named Nathan Price, my particular children would never have seen the light of this world. I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose."
* "People are bantu; the singular is muntu. Muntu does not mean exactly the same as person, though, because it describes a living person, a dead one, or someone not yet born. Muntu persists through all those conditions unchanged. The Bantu speak of "self" as a vision residing inside, peering out through the eyeholes of the body, waiting for whatever happens next. Using the body as a mask, muntu watches and waits without fear, because muntu itself cannot die. The transition from spirit to body and back to spirit again is merely a venture. It is a ride on the power of nommo, the force of a name to call oneself. Nommo rains from a cloud, rises in the vapor from a human mouth: a song, a scream, a prayer. A drum gives nommo in Congo, where drums have language. A dance gives nommo where bodies are not separate from the will that inhabits them.
* "Life could not have been better."
* "One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy."
* "We are all still the children we were, with plans we keep secret, even from ourselves."
* "If you ask me, that's how it is and ever shall be. You stick out your elbows, and hold yourself up."
* "Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story."
* "Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger."
* "You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember."
* "..when I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book."
* "I was seventeen, bursting utterly with happiness."
* "Oh, it's a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it's easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that's nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us. Had I not married a preacher named Nathan Price, my particular children would never have seen the light of this world. I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose."
* "People are bantu; the singular is muntu. Muntu does not mean exactly the same as person, though, because it describes a living person, a dead one, or someone not yet born. Muntu persists through all those conditions unchanged. The Bantu speak of "self" as a vision residing inside, peering out through the eyeholes of the body, waiting for whatever happens next. Using the body as a mask, muntu watches and waits without fear, because muntu itself cannot die. The transition from spirit to body and back to spirit again is merely a venture. It is a ride on the power of nommo, the force of a name to call oneself. Nommo rains from a cloud, rises in the vapor from a human mouth: a song, a scream, a prayer. A drum gives nommo in Congo, where drums have language. A dance gives nommo where bodies are not separate from the will that inhabits them.
* "Life could not have been better."
* "One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy."
* "We are all still the children we were, with plans we keep secret, even from ourselves."
* "If you ask me, that's how it is and ever shall be. You stick out your elbows, and hold yourself up."
* "Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story."
* "Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger."
* "You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember."