Women Authors From South Africa

"She would disappear folded like origami into her own dreams."

"This is the Detroit I want to write about," he says, feeling urbane as fuck. "Tattoo seances and nutty street art and text-message millionaires. People don't even know this is happening. Of course we know it's happening, shithead," Anorexic Thor says. "You don't know it's happening."

"Everyone lives three versions of themselves; a public life, a private life and a secret life. Watch any kid and how he acts with his friends at school. Ask his momma what he’s like at home. Try and get her to believe the same kid robbed the corner store. “Not my boy,” she’ll say and she’s right. Because her boy wouldn’t do that. But we are different things to different people in different contexts."

"Affectionate violence. For when a hug just won't do."

"She was always bad cop in the family, setting rules and boundaries as if parenting wasn’t the worst game of improve ever."

"But I really wanted to believe that there were these magic celestial bodies that would direct my life, tell me what to do, and it turns out it's not stars, it's some bits of screwy DNA. I'm just meat with faulty programming."

"She laughs, and that's really all he wanted."

"An empty house feels a certain way. Ripe with absence."

"You think fear eats up your capacity for wonder, but the awe cuts through her dulled and dimmed mind. Almost a religious experience."

"People don't want novelty – they want the reassurance of familiarity. No-one wants to be challenged, no-one wants to have their minds blown. There is an insatiable appetite for affirmation."

"Fear festers in the imagination. It’s not fear’s fault. That’s just the way it’s made. Nightmares breed. Allies become enemies. Subversives are everywhere. Paranoia justifies any persecution, and privacy is a luxury when the Reds have the bomb."

"It has been said that if you want the truth you should ask someone with Asperger syndrome. The only way he could understand the pain he had caused was to relate it back to something that might have made him feel inadequate and inferior. This was the only way he could comprehend what effect his words had had on her. As a consequence of this incident he became very careful about what he said in the future."

"They want their partners to intuitively know and understand what is required of them. They want to feel their partners understand their needs and desires without having to spell it out to them time after time."

"It is easy for the NT partner to forget that her partner may not know what it is he should say or how he should respond to a given situation."

"The mores that I was used to were neither purely Western nor purely Bantu. We were not ‘black Europeans’, yet I saw how we were not ‘white Bantu’ either."

"Indeed how can they help being so, forced as they are by the present political dispensation to observe us from a distance, which distorts and throws little light on our lives as we live them?"

"If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography … proves the point.”"

"The apparent aim of this paper is to reveal the contribution of archaeology to understanding the social relations of capitalism."

"The burden of this particular study of rural settlement in the Scottish Highlands is to show that archaeology helps to achieve a deeper understanding of the transition from clan ownership to individual ownership during the period of Improvement that heralded the dawn of the new commercial age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."

"But what is certain is that referendums, whether binding or not, are important barometers of political will. They provide a peaceful and democratic mechanism for expressing the people’s desires, and they can shift the course of history."

"One of the key reasons people across the world seek independence is the desire to protect their cultural heritage and identity."

"On the southern tip of Africa, the Western Cape faces its own questions of autonomy. With its unique cultural identity and starkly different economic and political realities compared to the rest of South Africa"

"The path to independence is never easy, and it is often fraught with political obstacles. Puerto Rico’s referendum may not deliver a clear or immediate answer, just as the Western Cape’s future remains uncharted."

"I first encountered your 2019 debut collection Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner (Modjaji Books) at the Rosebank branch of Exclusive Books. I spent so much time trying to read the two words on the cover, the ones in a small black font. After numerous failed attempts I decided I would use my magnifying glass when I got back home. It was in that moment that I realised: Oh, they are using the very cover to give me the visceral experience of what I am about to read! Then I thought: Effective! Smart! I love it! I am buying this book!"

"Compassion gives us the freedom to redefine ourselves as well as the all-important freedom to fail, which contains within it the freedom to take the risks that allow us to be truly creative."

"I was still in the queue at the bookshop when I read the contents page, and I began to smile, because Tongues of their Mothers—my second poetry collection—is also divided into four sections using the names of seasons. In your book, there are eleven poems in Winter, fifteen in Summer, three in Spring and thirteen in Autumn."

"In looking for the right places to make these tiny changes, there are three broad areas of opportunity. You can tweak your beliefs—or what psychologists call your mindset; you can tweak your motivations; and you can tweak your habits. When we learn how to make small changes in each of these areas, we set ourselves up to make profound, lasting change over the course of our lives."

"I am living from a place of healing."

"Serial killers are not monsters; they are human beings with tortured souls. I will never condone what they do, but I can understand them."

"Life is full of diving boards and other precipices, but, as we’ve seen throughout this discussion of emotional agility, making the leap is not about ignoring, fixing, fighting, or controlling fear—or anything else you might be experiencing. Rather, it’s about accepting and noticing all your emotions and thoughts, viewing even the most powerful of them with compassion and curiosity, and then choosing courage over comfort in order to do whatever you’ve determined is most important to you. Courage, once again, is not the absence of fear."

"These hands have Moulded monuments, created crafts, healed hearts."

"One of the drawbacks we face today with the internet is the existence of clickbait or synthetic sensational information."

"Since television series or films are often a dramatization of the events that happen in our lives, this has prompted me to launch my own YouTube Channel where I authentically speak about my experiences."

"As a professional psychologist, I therefore, through my YouTube Channel, offer authentic knowledge about forensic psychology. I want this platform to be inspirational and educational for everyone, free of cost and accessible."

"Good men and good women can stand together to fight injustice."

"I was a tool to help them perform their job of catching criminals and when they saw that my contribution was valuable, they taught me about investigation for I knew nothing about it. In return, I taught them about profiling, and this is how this whole idea came about to train and teach them. I founded the Investigative Psychology Unit of the South African Police Service and worked actively with the detectives I trained."

"It came after the weeks of intense classes that I conducted in order to teach detectives. There was also an advanced course. At the end of it, I told them “Well, what are you waiting for? Go catch me a killer!” This is how it became the title of the book."

"They are not Artificial Intelligence (AI)--generated monsters or Marvel comic book superheroes as often depicted in fictional series. The majority are not mentally ill. They are human beings, they could be your neighbour. Many people would presume that serial killers would be super intelligent, but they are not. They are normal people with average intelligence; few are intelligent and most are not."

"Serial killers exist there, and if one really wants to find them, that is where one has to look. One cannot begin to understand a serial killer's mind if one is unprepared and if one does not know what they feel. One does not have to be raped to acquire empathy for a rape victim. I did not have to kill to understand why others do, but I had to go through some harrowing experiences in order to understand."

"Our hidden demons are simply the residue of perfectly ordinary and almost universal insecurity, self-doubt, and fear of failure. Maybe you still resent your sister for flirting with your boyfriends in high school. Maybe you feel undervalued by your new boss. This is not even the stuff of a good, tear-soaked Oprah episode. But it can be enough to hook you into behaving in ways that don’t serve you."

"Perhaps the best term to describe living at the edge of our ability, thriving and flourishing, being challenged but not overwhelmed, is simply “whelmed.” And a key part of being whelmed lies in being selective in our commitments, which means taking on the challenges that really speak to you and that emerge from an awareness of your deepest values."

"In the same way, our suffering, our disengagement, our relationship challenges, and our other difficulties are almost never solved by thinking in the same old, automatic way. Being emotionally agile involves being sensitive to context and responding to the world as it is right now."

"It is a summer of songs composed in blood, tuned with guns and arranged in conversations. It is a summer of songs I sing in swelling volumes."

"I write poetry from my personal space, in my personal voice. I say “I am here”. I address women in the world."

"Every human being passes through five psychosexual developmental phases. They are the oral phase, anal phase, Oedipus or phallic phase, latency phase and the genital phase. A person can fixate in any of these phases and failure to resolve the fixation would be cause for pathology. A layman’s term for a fixation would be a mental short-circuit. It is an individualistic reaction to being exposed to too much or too little of something."

"South Africa has the third highest murder rate in the world, with Colombia and Swaziland ahead of it. The high rate of murder illustrates the amount of work that a Murder and Robbery detective has to cope with, and yet South Africa holds the record for apprehending serial killers within three to six months of a special investigation team being established, provided the serial killer stays active."

"I had never thought when I did my work that someone would make a TV series about it."

"I asked her where the posters in his room came from. She told me she had found some magazines in the forest at a spot where some soldiers had camped and had brought them home. This was shortly before the sexual murders started. I believe those pin-ups were the catalyst that triggered the fantasy that had been brewing inside Zikode since his childhood. His mother had unwittingly lit the tinder which had erupted into a blaze and cost many women their lives."

"At the start of a new fiction project, there is always a piece written quickly, assuredly, with little hesitation, and with the euphoric feeling that comes with knowing one has found somewhere to begin"

"The motive is settled deep within the unconscious psyche, and the serial killer is unaware of this. By ‘irresistible compulsion’ I do not mean that serial killers have absolutely no power over the urge to kill. Many of them experience the urge as an external force taking control of their own will and forcing them to commit murder, a force they perceive they cannot resist."