Adrian > Adrian's Quotes

“the sicker the patients are the less noise they make.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“but anyone that dresses and does their hair as carefully as your mom does every single day is unhappy on the inside. She’s trying to hide all her messiness,”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“He opened his eyes before many of our people did,”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“Obiora asked, and I looked at him again. He was a bold, male version of what I could never have been at fourteen, what I still was not.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“Death is healing, it tells us to forgive, it reminds us that we don’t want to die alone.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“I wondered if I would have to confess that I had shared a room with a heathen. I paused then, in my meditation, to pray that Papa would never find out that Papa-Nnukwu had visited and that I had shared a room with him.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“When Papa prayed for Papa-Nnukwu, he asked only that God convert him and save him from the raging fires of hell.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“He was still smiling as I quietly turned and went back to the bedroom. I never smiled after we said the rosary back home. None of us did.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“Amaka and Papa-Nnukwu spoke sometimes, their voices low, twining together. They understood each other, using the sparest words. Watching them, I felt a longing for something I knew I would never have.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“Fear. I was familiar with fear, yet each time I felt it, it was never the same as the other times, as though it came in different flavors and colors.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“I don’t regret my alcoholism anymore. Before I left California my youngest son, Joel, came to breakfast. The same son I used to steal from, who had told me I wasn’t his mother. I cooked cheese blintzes; we drank coffee and read the paper, muttering to each other about Rickey Henderson, George Bush. Then he went to work. He kissed me and said So long, Ma. So long, I said.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories