Significant sentences from book five EXODUS

• The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as reals as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill. My body understood there was no safe place for me to be. Orleanna, pg 381.
• We only took what we could carry on out backs. Leah, pg 390.
• In all our time in the Congo I'd been awestruck by what the ladies could carry this way, but had never once tried it myself. What a revelatioin, that I could carry my own parcel like amy woman here! After the first several miles I ceased to feel the weight on my head at all. Leah, pg 390.
• I ahve only the haziestrecollection of waving at my mother and sister in a rising cloud of diesel exhaust and mosquitoes as they began their slow, permanent exodus from the Congo. I wish I could remember their faces, Adah's especially. Did she feel I'd helped to save her? Leah, pg 399.
• For the last entire year I have worn my little white gloves and pillbox hat to the First Episcopal Church in Johannesburg and recited it right along with the best of them. Rachel Price Axelroo, pg 402.
• Not that I would have minded the company of simple minds, but I needed to flee from Bethlehem, where the walls are made of eyes stacked in rows like little bricks, and every breath of air has the sour taste of someone's recent gossip. Adah Price, pg 407.
• In organic chemistry, invertebrate zoology, and the inspired symmetry on Mendelian genetics, I have found a religion that serves. I recite the Periodic Table of Elements like a prayer; I take my examinations as Holy Communion, and the pass of the first semester was a sacrament. Adah Price, pg 409.
• Betrayal is a friend i have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with the clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune...As it turns out, though, betrayal can also breed penitents, shrewd minor politicians, and ghosts. Our family seems to have produces one of each. Adah, pg 414.
• When we're alone in the laundry room, she asks me how do I know I'm in love. "I must be. What else would make you stupid enough to put hundreds of people in danger?" Leah, pg 416.
• If I'd known what marriage was going to be like, well, heck I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens together into a rope and hung myself from a tree. Rachel Axelroot, pg 454.
• I can recall, years ago, watching Rachel cry real tears over a burn hole in her green dress while, just outside our doorm completely naked children withered from the wholes in their empty stomachsm and I seriously wondered if Rachel's heart were the size of a thimble. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 430.
• When the neighbours or students ask me my nationality, I tell them I came from a country that no longer exists. they can believe it. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 433.
• We have manioc and yams to fill our bellies, but protein is scarcer than diamonds. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 436.
• "But, aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doeasn't really need?" Pascal. Adah Price, pg 441.
• Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirts and bone dust to quiet the fire in their emty stomach lining? Adah Price, pg 441.
• What I carried out of Congo on my crooked little back is a ferocious uncertainty about the worth of a life. And now I am becoming a doctor. How very sensible of me. Adah Price, pg 443.
• Our house is sturdy, with concrete floor and a tin roof. We live in what would be called, in America, a slum, though here it's an island of relative luxury in the outskirts of la cite, where the majority have a good deal less in the way of roofing, to say the least. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 446.
• "I thought you said the Congolese don't believe in keeping rickes to themselves," I told Anatole once, inclined toward the argument. But he just laughed. "Who? Mobutu? He is not even African now." "Well, what is he, then?" "He is the on wife belonging to many white men." Leah Price Ngemba, pg 455-456.
• Remy, my third husband, was very devoted. He was and older man. My life has been 101 calamities with at least half of them in the marriage department, but finally I got lucky in love, with Remy Fairley. He at least had the decency to die and leame me the Equatorial. Rachel Axelroot DuPree Fairley, pg 461.
• Oh, I wokr myself to the bone, keeping this business open seven days a week and the weekends. Rachel Axelroot DuPree Fairley, pg 462.
• We're all keeping out hopes up for family relations, I guess, but our true family fell apart after Ruth May's tragic death. Rachel Axelroot DuPree Fairley, pg 464-465
• What happened to us in the Congo was simply athe bad luck of two opposite worlds crashing into each other, causing tragedy. Rachel Axelroot DuPree Fairley, pg 465.
• The citizens of my homeland regarded my husband and children as primitives, or freaks.On the streets, from a distance, they'd scowl at us, thinking we were merely the scourge they already knew and loathed - the mixed-race couple, with mongrel children as advertisment of our sind. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 468-469.
• Now, husbandless in this new neighbourhood, my skin glows like a bare bulb. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 472.
• They know just one thing about foreigners, and that is everything we've ever  done to them. I can't possibly inprove Anatole's standing in their eyes. I must be the weakness that brought him down. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 472.
• This was the first and the absolute last time I am going to participate within a reunion of my sisters, I've just returned from a rendezvous with Leah and Adah that was simply a sensational failure. Rachel Price, pg 478.
• All human odes are essentially one. "My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it." Adah Price, pg 492.
• Sometimes at night, in secret, I still limp purposefully around my apartment, like Mr. Hyde, trying to recover my old ways of seeing and thinking. Adah Price, pg 492.
• No one else misses Ada. Not even Mother. She seems thoroughly pleased to see the srumpled bird she delivered finally straighten up and fly right. Adah Price, pg 492.
• Congo was a woman in shadows, dark-hearted, moving to a drumbeat. Zaire is tall young man tossing salt over his shoulder. Adah Price, pg 495.
• Tall and straigh I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power in in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are out successes. Adah Price, pg 496.
• I have four sons, all named for men we lost to was: Pascal, Patrice, Martin-Lothaire, and Nataniel. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 497.