Madeline’s Reviews > The Poisonwood Bible > Status Update

“Still, there was some dark thing out there watching us from the forest and coiling up under people's beds at night, and whether you call it fear or the dreaming of snakes or false idolatry or what- it's still something. It doesn't care what prayers we say at bedtime, or whether we admit we believe in it. Does it believe in us? that's the question.”

"You shouldn't have come here, Béene, but you are here and nobody in Kilanga wants you to starve. They understand that white people make very troublesome ghosts."

2/2 Because we have not tasted the sacrament of palm nuts? Or. Might the tall, thin man rise up and declare: We don't like Ike. So sorry, but Ike should perhaps be killed now with a poisoned arrow. Oh, the magazines would have something to say about that all right. What sort of man would wish to murder the president of another land? None but a barbarian. A man with a bone in his hair.”

“Our Father tries to make them understand the batiza is no fetish but a contract with Jesus Christ. If baptized, the children would be in heaven now.
And the mothers look at him slant-eyed. If my daughter were in heaven could she still watch the baby while I work in my manioc?
Could she carry water for me? Would a son in heaven have wives to take care of me when I am old?”

2/2 - You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease, they'll bend to his light.”

1/2 “For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads.

2/2 - Why ever should the Congolese read our doom? After all, we have offered to feed their children to the crocodiles in order for them to know the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory.”

1/2 “Khrushchev is said to be here dancing with the man-eating natives, teaching them to hate the Americans and the Belgians. It must be true, for how else would the poor Congolese know how to hate the Americans and the Belgians? After all, we have such white skin. We eat their food inside our large house, and throw out the bones.
Bones that lie helter-skelter on the grass, from which to tell our fortunes.