"Whenever you read a good book, it's like the author is right there, in the room, talking to you, which is why I don't like to read good books."

i've started dogearing the books i read, and writing down my favorite lines. these are some of the bits i liked most...

Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the sore, spying the jungle’s edge through their fitted brass lenses. Imagine that by some miracle of dread or reverence they lowered their spyglasses, turned, set their riggings, sailed on. (7-8)

Man alive, I am all steamed up with no place to go. When Tat Ndu comes to our house, jeez oh man. I can even stand to look at him looking at me. I revert my eyes. Sometimes I do unladylike things like scratch myself and pretend I’m retarded. (268)

Strange to say, if you do not stamp yourself with the words exhilarated or terrified, those two things feel exactly the same in a body. Creeping past our parents’ bedroom and out the door, our bodies felt as they did on Christmas Past and all the Easter mornings of the world, when Christ is risen and our mother has hidden a tribe of sugared marshmallow bunnies in the startled grass of Bethlehem, Georgia. (361)

Until that moment I’d always believed I could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened. The misery, the hunt, the ants, the embarrassments of all we saw and endured – those were just stories I would tell someday with a laugh and a toss of my hair, when Africa was faraway and make-believe like the people in history books. The tragedies that happened to Africans were not mine. We were different, not just because we were white and had our vaccinations, but because we were simply a much, much luckier kind of person. I would get back home to Bethlehem, Georgia, and be exactly the same Rachel as before. I’d grow up to be a carefree American wife, with nice things and a sensible way of life and three grown sisters to share my ideals and talk to on the phone from time to time. This is what I believed. I’d never planned on being someone different. Never imagined I would be a girl they’d duck their eyes from and whisper about as tragic, for having suffered such a loss. (367)

Our union has been difficult for both of us in the long run, but what union isn’t? Marriage is one long fit of compromise, deep and wide. There is always one agenda swallowing another, a squeaky wheel crying out. But hasn’t our life together meant more to the world than either of us could have meant alone? (473)