Purple Hibiscus Quotes With Page Numbers
“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, Kambili Achike as the narrator, Breaking Gods: Palm Sunday, Page 8
“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, Kambili Achike as the narrator, Speaking With Out Spirits: Before Palm Sunday, Page 23
“I was stained by failure.”
~Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus, Kambili Achike as the narrator, Speaking With Out Spirits: Before Palm Sunday, Page 39
“Sometimes life begins when the marriage ends”
~Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus, Beatrice Achike (Mama), Speaking With Out Spirits: Before Palm Sunday, Page 75
“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, Aunty Ifeoma, Speaking With Out Spirits: Before Palm Sunday, Page 144
“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, Kambili Achike as the narrator, Speaking With Out Spirits: Before Palm Sunday, Page 174
“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, Amaka, Speaking With Out Spirits: Before Palm Sunday, Page 220
“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, Kambili Achike as the narrator, Speaking With Out Spirits: Before Palm Sunday, Page 226
“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, Aunty Ifeoma, Speaking With Out Spirits: Before Palm Sunday, Pages 244-45
“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, Kambili Achike as the narrator, A Different Silence: The Present, Page 301
“…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, Kambili Achike as the narrator, A Different Silence: The Present, Page 303
“I cannot control even the dreams that I have made.”
~Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus, Kambili Achike as the narrator, A Different Silence: The Present, Page 305