Elsa Nordström

“Amaka says people love priests because they want to compete with God, they simply want God as a rival. But we are not rivals, God and I, we are simply sharing. I no longer wonder if I have a right to love Father Amadi; I simply go ahead an love him. I no longer wonder if the checks I have been writing to the Missionary Fathers of the Blessed Way are bribes to God; I just go ahead and write them. I no longer Wonder if I chose St. Anderw´s church in Unugu as my new church because the priest there is a Blessed Way Missionary as Father Amadi is; I just go.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“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

“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

“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