Taylor’s Reviews > The Poisonwood Bible > Status Update

“Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That was the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.”

“Yes, you are all accomplices to the fall, and yes, we are gone forever. Gone to a ruin so strange it must be called by another name. Call it muntu: all that is here”

“The glide of belly on branch. The mouth thrown open wide, sky blue. I am all that is here.”

“As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmers long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.”

“Recalling her strange transfigured shadow the last time I pushed her in the swing”-Leah recalling when she saw Ruth May’s legs as antelope legs while pushing her on the swing. Foreshadowing to her death? As this moment came as a downward spiral after Leah chose to hunt with the men, and created discord in the community, and subsequently shot an antelope. An antelope in exchange for her sister?

“The trilling of our neighbours’ tongues set loose knives that cut the flesh from our bones and made us fall down with our shame and our love and our anger. We were all cut down together by the knife of our own hope, for if there is any single thing that everyone hopes most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.”

“The death of something living is the price of our survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep”

“Crawled on their hands and knees, tried to eat the dirt from the graves. Other women had to pull them away. The owls croon and croon, and the air must be thick with the spirits of children dead.”

“but still it’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known”