Novelists from South Africa

"The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is."

"The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand."

"I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead —" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say."

"Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn’t make the world over if it were to be as easy as that."

"I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it. (1979)"

"I think that the decision to be sincere is an artistic one."

"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area."

"Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society…A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implication and he is politically committed. (1983)"

"In countries like Czechoslovakia, like South Africa, like Argentina, guilt by association is a fact and therefore the friendships you form can be a political act. This circumstance, way of life, is very complex. People think that a political act is signing a declaration or planting a bomb, but there are all kinds of political acts in countries where there is a great political struggle going on."

"I think that as long as those of us in South Africa who are articulate are asked to go abroad, and we know we are going to be interviewed, we cannot refuse. There are so many people in South Africa, within the country, who are muzzled. And there are others who may not be muzzled within South Africa but whose passports are withdrawn, people like Bishop Desmond Tutu-a very important voice; you know, a writer is nothing compared with him. He is a big figure, a real leader, and he can't go abroad and speak. So I think that those of us who can, as long as we can, we have to use the opportunity."

"Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity."

"There was no mistaking her. She was a young woman whose cultivated gentleness of expression and shabby homespun style of dress, in the context in which she was encountered, suggested not transcendental meditation centre or environmental concern group or design studio, but a sign of identification with the humanity of those who had nothing and risked themselves."

"'Even the cat buries its dirt; I carry mine around with me.' She thought of saying it aloud many times in the weeks after she came home from the hospital."

"The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable."

"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."

"In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together."

"Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself."

"What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates."

"You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder."

"I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that."

"Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society."

"Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks."

"Can there be the phenomenon of a world state of mind?"

"time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate"

"Fear. It's unacknowledged; shared by friend and foe if nothing else is."

"Dangers are relative, over time and distance; fear is relative, whether it menaces a multitude or a single life, but it always demands the same answers: a yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition, fear that eats the soul."

"Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be."

"There are two kinds of leaders in the species humankind. There is the man or woman of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman who creates a self out of response to people's needs, the call of conscience against oppression, injustice, and sufferings of any nature within our human condition. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other it is a charge of energy which comes in others needs and the demands these make on all of us who share humanity. Conscience is a form of solidarity."

"The question mark remains. It hangs over peace negotiations - that vital base for the answer an outsider who believes in justice surely must support: two fully independent states on agreed, realistic frontiers."

"Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition."

"No globalisation without a human face."

"There can be no global culture while there are inhabitants deprived of the ability to read, to have access to the powers of the imagination released through the written word, through literature; deprived of the intellectual and spiritual bounty of libraries."

"Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it."

"Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life."

"Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer nights. A tourist could be fooled. Africa already; at last, even though he went to bed in yet another metropole."

"Just before light, when it's supposed to be darkest, the body's at its lowest ebb and in the hospital on the hill old people die the night opens, a Black hole between stars, and from it comes a deep panting. Very distant and at once very close, right in the year, for the sound of breath is always intimate.It grows and gorws, a rising groan lifs out of the curved bars of the cage and hangs above the whole city -- And then it drops back, sinks away, becomes panting again."

"Wait for it; it will fall so quiet, hardly more than a faint roughness snagging the air in the ear's chambers. ... And begins once more. The panting reaches up up up down down down to that awe-ful groan!"

"The zoo lions do no utter during the day. They yawn; wait for their ready-slaughtered kill to be tossed at them; keep their unused claws sheathed in huge harmless pads on which top-heavy, untidy heads rest,... gazing through lid-slats with what zoo visitors think of in sentimental prurience as yearning.Or once we were near the Baltic and the leviathan hooted from the night fog at sea. But would I dare to open my mouth now? Could I trust my breath to be sweet, these stale nights?"

"It's only on warm summer nights that the lions are restless. What they're seeing when they gaze during the day is nothing, their eyes are open but they don't see us -you can tell that when the lens of the pupil suddenlys shutters at the close swoop0 of one of the popcorn-begging pigeons through the bars of the cage. ... It's only on certain nights that their muscles flex and they begin to pant,their flanks heave as if they had been running through the dark night while other creatures shrank from their path, their jaws hang tense and wet as saliva flows as if in response to a scent of prey, at last they heave up their too-big heads, heavy, heavy heads, and out it comes. Out over the suburbs. A dreadful straining of the bowels to deliver itself; a groan that hangs above the houses in a low-lying cloud of smog and anguish."

"No one can say what it was the white soldier said over the telephone to his commanding officer, and if the commanding officer had told him what was going to be done, or whether the white soldier knew, as a matter of procedure laid down in his military training for this kind of war, what would be done. The police found the bicycle beneath his dangling shoes. So the family hanger-on still rides it; it would have been lost if it had been safe in the kitchen when the raid came. No one knows where the chief found a rope, in the ruins of the village."

"The young man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places. The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring. Pouring, pouring. She sat there, sick. A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp. She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.She sat there not wanting to move or speak, or to look at anything even; so that the mood should be associated with nothing, no object, word, or sight that might recur and so recall the feeling again….Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner.The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer."

"The train came out of the red horizon and bore down towards them over the single straight track."

"Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station."

"Between its vandyke teeth, in the mouth opened in a roar too terrible to be heard, it had a black tongue."

"I should have given it up long ago if it had not been for her."

"Out in the country, even ten miles out, life is better than that."

"The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical.”"

"And for a moment I accept the triumph as I had managed it.”"

"When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension,’ they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a [B]lack man won’t stand aside for a white man.”"

"Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle. (First lines)"

"There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be."

"Flora pretended to cuddle me against the cold, but I didn't need her kind of emotional excitation. She talked about 'the girls' in there, and my mother was one of them."

"For nearly thirty years the Communist Party allied itself as a legal organization with the African struggle for black rights and the extension of the franchise to the black majority."

"Strong emotion - faith? - has different ways of being manifested among the different disciples within which people order their behaviour."

"Conrad went off some evenings for Spanish lessons and sometimes came back with the girl who taught him."

"Communists are the last optimists."

"The will is my own. The emotion's my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there's no 'we', only 'I'."

"Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next."

"The blackman is not fighting for equality with whites. Blackness is the blackman refusing to believe the whiteman's way of life is best for blacks."

"The main reason why we're still where we are is blacks haven't united as blacks because we're told all the time to do it is to be racist."

"Our liberation cannot be divorced from black consciousness because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves -"

"When the body is no longer an attraction, an expression of desire, to bare your breasts and belly is simple; you lay like dogs or cats grateful for the sun."

"But there's no indemnity. You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results."

"It'll be enough to take your mind off your stomach. - When lovers cannot touch, they tease each other instead."

"after my first trip out, I realized that “home” was certainly and exclusively—Africa. It could never be anywhere else."

"It was Sinclair's The Jungle that really started me thinking about politics: I thought, good God, these people who are exploited in a meat-packing factory-they're just like blacks here. And the whole idea that people came to America, not knowing the language, having to struggle in sweat shops. . . I didn't relate this to my own father, because my father was bourgeois by then... but I related it to the blacks. Again, what a paradox that South Africa was the blacks' own country, but they were recruited just as if they had been migrant workers for the mines. So I saw the analogy. And that was the beginning of my thinking about my position vis-à-vis blacks. But though I didn't know anything-I was twelve or thirteen, and leading the odd kind of life I did, living in books-I began to think about these things before, perhaps, I was ready for them. When I got to university, it was through mixing with other people who were writing or painting that I got to know black people as equals. In a general and inclusive, non-racial way, I met people who lived in the world of ideas, in the world that interested me passionately. In the town where I lived, there was no mental food of this kind at all. I’m often amazed to think how they live, those people, and what an oppressed life it must be, because human beings must live in the world of ideas. This dimension in the human psyche is very important. It was there, but they didn’t know how to express it."

"(talking about herself while she was in university) My approach to living as a white supremacist, perforce, among blacks, was, I see now, the humanist approach, the individualistic approach. I felt that all I needed, in my own behavior, was to ignore and defy the color bar. In other words, my own attitude toward blacks seemed to be sufficient action. I didn’t see that it was pretty meaningless until much later."

"the real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa. I am dealing with people; here are people who are shaped and changed by politics. In that way my material is profoundly influenced by politics."

"in Burger’s Daughter, you could say on the face of it that it’s a book about white communists in South Africa. But to me, it’s something else. It’s a book about commitment. Commitment is not merely a political thing. It’s part of the whole ontological problem in life. It’s part of my feeling that what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that’s what writing is, I think that’s what painting is. It’s seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life."

"there’s a fairly good relationship between black and white writers. Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship, and most white writers feel a strong sense of responsibility to promote, defend, and help black writers where possible."

"it was Proust who said that style is the moment of identification between the writer and his situation. Ideally that is what it should be—one allows the situation to dictate the style."

"Death is really the mystery of life, isn’t it? If you ask, “What happens when we die? Why do we die?” you are asking, “Why do we live?”"

"Progress is the business of making life more safe and more enjoyable . . . fuller, generally."

"If somebody is partly frivolous or superficial, has moments of cruelty or self-doubt, I don’t write them off, because I think that absolutely everybody has what are known as human failings."

"A writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing—he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people."

"I can’t understand writers who feel they shouldn’t have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary; one has got to keep in touch with that. The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner’s or spraying some plants infected with aphids is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back."

"I would like to say something about how I feel in general about what a novel, or any story, ought to be. It’s a quotation from Kafka. He said, “A book ought to be an ax to break up the frozen sea within us.”"

"The day the cease-fire was signed she was caught in a crowd. Peasant boys from Europe who had made up the colonial army and freedom fighters whose column had marched into town were staggering about together outside the barracks, not three blocks from her house in whose rooms, for ten years, she had heard the blurred parade-ground bellow of colonial troops being trained to kill and be killed."

"How to break in: with a name, a statement."

"You said: "...and I'm between two girls at the moment.' What exactly had led up to this statement that could have come at any time, that I had been ready for so long I began to forget it would ever come, and that you had been waiting to say for a specific length of time I could not know?"

"When you live in a small town far from the world you read about in municipal library books, the advent of repair men in the house is a festival. Daily life is gaily broken open, improvisation takes over."

"There were two soldiers in front of her, blocking her off by their clumsy embrace(how do you do it, how do you do what you've never done before) and the embrace opened like a door and took her in -- a pink hand with bitten nails grasping her right arm, a black hand with a big-dialled watch and thong bracelet pulling at her left elbow. Their three heads collided gaily, musk of sweat and tang of strong sweet soap clapped a mask to her nose and mouth. They all gasped with delicious shock. She put up an arm around each neck, the rough pile of an army haircut on one side, the soft negro hair on the other, and kissed them both on the cheek. The embrace broke."

"An accolade, one side a white cheek, the other a black. The white one she kissed on the left cheek, the black one on the right, as if these were two sides of one face."

"She had not kissed on the mouth, she had not sought anonymous lips and tongues in the licence of festival. Yet she had kissed. Watching herself again, she knew that. She did not tell what happened not because her husband would suspect licence in her."

"The ugly mansions of the rich who had fled stood empty on the bluff above the sea."

"She avoided walking past the barracks because of the machine guns the young sentries had in place of rifles."

"Afrikaner farmer—a regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando”"

"He [the victim] was my friend, I always took him hunting with me"

"city and overseas people"

"Bad enough to have killed a man,” he believes they will say to themselves, “without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well"

"a moment of high excitement shared through the roof of the cab"

"big, calm, clever son of Willem Van der Vyver"

"He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer—regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando—shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa."

"People in the farming community understand how he must feel. Bad enough to have killed a man, without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well."

"Odd in-between period which sometimes inserts itself into historical time when not only the later historians but the actors and witnesses, the living themselves, become aware of an interval in time which is altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things that are not yet. In history, these intervals have shown more than once that they may contain the moment of truth."

"“[T]he isotopy of fragmentation constitutes a unifying web structurally present at the level of story, text, and narration”"

"despite the fact that the narrative demonstrates that the voice of the ‘other’ can be heard and imagined, Gordimer’s attitude toward her own whiteness […] is resentful and hostile”"

"propos[ed] a future South Africa, not only on terms of equality of races but of sexes, too”"

"She reminds me of pig. Our ancestors didn't eat pig."

"What had Aila done to assuage his anguish at Baby's attempt to end her life before it had begun? Nothing. Silence. Silence upon the other silence. Comfort and understanding he had had to find elsewhere."

"It was my mother who had talked under interrogation. I know why she did. It was to be sure neither her husband nor I would be held responsible."

"Underground: this time, as at other times, he's aware of how unsuitably abstract a term that is. To hide away, you have to be out in the open of life; too soon and easily run to ground, holed up somewhere. Best safety lies in crowds. ("Safe Houses")"

"Breathe. Breath. A baby, a chicken hatching-the first imperative is to breathe. Breathless. Breathe! Out of this concentration, in which he forgets even the rhythm of his feet, is a bellows pumped by the command, the admonition, the slap on the bottom that shocks the baby into inhalation-comes his second wind. Unless you go out like this, morning and evening, you never know what no one can remember, that first discovery of independent life: I can breathe. (beginning of "Keeping Fit")"

"That night our mother went to the shop and she didn't come back. Ever. What happened? I don't know. (beginning of "The Ultimate Safari")"

"When the six-year-old daughter of a friend of mine overheard her father telling someone that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize, she asked whether I had ever received it before. He replied that the Prize was something you could get only once. Whereupon the small girl thought a moment: 'Oh' she said, 'so it's like chicken-pox.'"

"I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations."

"We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone."

"When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty. These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as 'overseas'."

"What we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world."

"In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuation, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues. The word flies through space, it is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come."

"Like the prisoners incarcerated with the jaguar in Borges' story, 'The God's Script', who was trying to read, in a ray of light which fell only once a day, the meaning of being from the marking on the creature's pelt, we spend our lives attempting to interpret through the word the readings we take in the societies, the world of which we are part. It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being."

"Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why."

"Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation, death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun and moon, plenty and disaster. With myth, the writer's ancestors, the oral story-tellers, began to feel out and formulate these mysteries, using the elements of daily life — observable reality — and the faculty of the imagination — the power of projection into the hidden — to make stories."

"Myth was the mystery plus the fantasy — gods, anthropomorphized animals and birds, chimera, phantasmagorical creatures — that posits out of the imagination some sort of explanation for the mystery. Humans and their fellow creatures were the materiality of the story, but as Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote, 'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.'"

"There are many proven explanations for natural phenomena now; and there are new questions of being arising out of some of the answers. For this reason, the genre of myth has never been entirely abandoned, although we are inclined to think of it as archaic. If it dwindled to the children's bedtime tale in some societies, in parts of the world protected by forests or deserts from international megaculture it has continued, alive, to offer art as a system of mediation between the individual and being. And it has made a whirling comeback out of Space, an Icarus in the avatar of Batman and his kind, who never fall into the ocean of failure to deal with the gravity forces of life."

"Perhaps it is the positive knowledge that humans now possess the means to destroy their whole planet, the fear that they have in this way themselves become the gods, dreadfully charged with their own continued existence, that has made comic-book and movie myth escapist."

"The forces of being remain. They are what the writer, as distinct from the contemporary popular mythmaker, still engage today, as myth in its ancient form attempted to do."

"The writer in relation to the nature of perceivable reality and what is beyond — imperceivable reality — is the basis for all these studies, no matter what resulting concepts are labelled, and no matter in what categorized microfiles writers are stowed away for the annals of literary historiography. Reality is constructed out of many elements and entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and left unexpressed for breathing-space in the mind."

"Literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too."

"Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope."

"Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light — and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau — into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being."

"I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses — the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word."

"I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books . . . But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could."

"With adolescence comes the first reaching out to otherness through the drive of sexuality. For most children, from then on the faculty of the imagination, manifest in play, is lost in the focus on day dreams of desire and love, but for those who are going to be artists of one kind or another the first life-crisis after that of birth does something else in addition: the imagination gains range and extends by the subjective flex of new and turbulent emotions. There are new perceptions. The writer begins to be able to enter into other lives. The process of standing apart and being involved has come."

"Both Borges and Sartre, from their totally different extremes of denying literature a social purpose, were certainly perfectly aware that it has its implicit and unalterable social role in exploring the state of being, from which all other roles, personal among friends, public at the protest demonstration, derive. Borges was not writing for his friends, for he published and we all have received the bounty of his work. Sartre did not stop writing, although he stood at the barricades in 1968."

"Camus dealt with the question best. He said that he liked individuals who take sides more than literatures that do. 'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.' So Camus called for 'Courage in and talent in one's work.' And Márquez redefined tender fiction thus: The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can. I believe that these two statements might be the credo for all of us who write. They do not resolve the conflicts that have come, and will continue to come, to contemporary writers. But they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of the writer squarely to her and his existence, the reason to be, as a writer, and the reason to be, as a responsible human, acting, like any other, within a social context."

"Being here: in a particular time and place. That is the existential position with particular implications for literature."

"Most imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer's themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea."

"There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment."

"The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born."

"The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art: trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs."

"When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us. If something happens where I live, you see it tomorrow or perhaps even at the same time it is happening there. It's not "one world" in the sense that conflicts are resolved in the world. But we are more one world in that we know what is going on and are psychologically influenced by what goes on around us."

"for country people, things are as they were. They are very remote, very poor, very dependent on the white farmers they work for. It's very difficult to organize them. There are still huge, huge problems to be tackled."

"one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity. They continue to love, to laugh, to get pleasure out of life."

"This idea that revolutionaries are martyrs who go around looking gloomy and noble, this is a romantic idea for people who've never met anybody who's gone through the experiences."

"to me this is what fiction is about; it asks questions, and it doesn't answer."

"The real influence of the events in the Soviet Union was to spread a lot of unease and anxiety in the African National Congress, because the Soviet Union had been the only country, really, that had stood by us all those years. The West never lifted a finger or gave a cent to the African National Congress. America, England, Germany-everyone supported the South African government against the attempts of the African National Congress to bring about change."

"...a swarthy man (Italian or jew?) with a scarred grin, and eyes, one dark-brilliant, one blurred blind, from whom radiant vitality comes impudently since he is gesticulating with a stump in place of one arm."

"The purpose of life is to defend the body against the violence of pain."

"That kind of act isn’t in the range of emotional control in which their son’s character was formed, or the contemporary ethic that men don’t own women. Therefore the act could not have been committed."

"She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not met me. She doesn’t do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful."

"I have the feeling you’re in some way suspicious of me. You’re trying to … get me to explain, because I’m his mother. I ought to know, I should know why. And I’m his mother. I ought to know!"

"Whatever happens to him, whatever he has done … he can come to us. There’s nothing you cannot tell us. We’re always there for you. Always."

"Duncan found her and took her to hospital. He brought her back to life. Literally. She owes her life to Duncan; or she blames him."

"Discovery is not an end. Only a new mystery."

"Two creatures caught in the headlights of catastrophe. Nothing between Duncan and the judge, passing sentence, but Motsamai and his confidence."

"Oh dear, I’m sorry, Bra[brother] and Duncan remembers that “it was exactly the manner, the words, with which the man had announced the end of the months they had lived as lovers.""

"Had not been able to tell them anything that was leading him towards that Friday night when something terrible happened to him."

"...in whom self-control has been strongly established since childhood”, and that the evening of the murder was no exception."

"...cannot distinguish which Duncan is being described in truth."

"It is not in his nature. Never. I swear on my own life."

"Disgust, a disintegration of everything."

"I suddenly picked up the gun on the table. And then he was quiet."

"Whether or not harmful intention was premeditated, when the accused picked up the gun … was he in a state of automatism in which … there was total loss of control?"

"Bring death and life together."

"Clustered predators round a kill. It's a small car with a young woman inside it. The battery has failed and taxis, cars, minibuses, vans, motorcycles butt and challenge one another, reproach and curse her, a traffic mob mounting its own confusion. Get going. Stupid bloody woman. Idikazana lomlungu, le! She throws up hands, palms open, in surrender. They continue to jostle and blare their impatience. She gets out of her car and faces them. (first lines)"

"That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine. (p144)"

"All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity. (p252)"

"To me, writing, from the very beginning and right until this day, is a voyage of discovery. Of the mystery of life. I am one of those people who have no religious faith, I am an atheist. I believe there is only this life. But this life is so incredible."

"The truth can only be pieced together from these different bits of knowledge, these different impressions, these different experiences. Goethe said: “You close your eyes and you dip your hand into your society and you bring up a little bit of the truth.” And that is the material of your writing."

"I’m beginning now even to see it in my own books which are written from many different points of view, very different personae, first person as a man, a child, a woman, a young person, an older person, there is the sense, looking back, that you are really writing one book all your life. Because there is this voyage of discovery of life."

"There is more truth in my fiction than in nonfiction. I think, subconsciously, [if] I am writing an article or talking to you, there is a certain amount of self-censorship going on. But in my fiction I am writing as if I were dead. I want to say it all. I want to say everything I know."

"Do we ever live really in the present? I don’t think so, not entirely, do you?...There are always intrusions, sometimes welcome, sometimes not, from the past."

"Writers don’t only listen, they also look. Though, indeed, they do listen. I started being an eavesdropper when I was a child, picking up unexplained little bits of conversation and imagining what led to that, what drama in that couple’s life, or what happened between that child and the parent when I overheard: “Stop that! You’re being very naughty.” You know, what does it all mean?"

"As a writer, I'm a composite intelligence."

"Television and newspapers show people's lives at a certain point. But novels tell you what happened after the riot, what happened when everybody went home."

"Music has no limits of a life-span."

"A desert is a place without expectation."

"Death's the discarder."

"Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships."

"I believe that women writers have not engaged or been allowed to participate in the discourse of official remembrance and that this is why their literature has been able to capture the frailty of the human spirit as well as its depth. Women writers who have contributed to the softness of remembrance can be traced from the early diary writings of young Anne Frank, to the visionary human rights declaration of Eleanor Roosevelt, and finally, to the powerful denouncing of apartheid by Nadine Gordimer."

"I will always be grateful for the presence in the world of Nadine Gordimer, who has delivered in literature a South Africa most of us could not have known without her."

"As a writer and as a human being, Nadine Gordimer responded with exemplary courage and creative energy to the great challenge of her times, the system of apartheid unjustly and heartlessly imposed on the South African people. Looking to the great realist novelists of the 19th century as models, she produced a body of work in which the South Africa of the late 20th century is indelibly recorded for all time."

"Nadine Gordimer helped me see how fiction writing can illuminate reality"

"Because I have known so many different writers I have often thought about what generosity means in a writer. Sometimes, as with other people you meet, you can tell about a writer at once. Though I only met her on one occasion I knew immediately that Nadine Gordimer was an enormously likeable, generous and admirable person, and that is what I felt over many years reading her work."

"Nadine Gordimer's work is endowed with an emotional genius so palpable one experiences it like a finger pressing steadily upon the prose."

"The South African Jewish author Nadine Gordimer, who died on Sunday, July 13, at age 90, expressed an even-handed humanism throughout her literary career. This is far from the case for every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which Gordimer was accorded in 1991. Her scrupulous sense of fairness, which motivated her to oppose apartheid in her native land, also led her in 2008 to resist strident calls to boycott a Jerusalem writers’ conference. Instead, Gordimer accepted the invitation from Mishkenot Sha’ananim, determined to meet with Palestinians and Israelis because the literary festival was meant to “assert vitally that whatever violent, terrible, bitter and urgent chasms of conflict lie between peoples, the only solutions for peace and justice exist and must begin with both sides talking to one another…I shall do my utmost to uphold the principles and practice I have held, and still hold, at home in our country.”"

"In the course of an impressive four-decade-long career, the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer has mapped and remapped the spiritual and psychological landscape of South Africa."

"In South Africa, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Nadine Gordimer, Abie Nathan, and Helen Suzman are only among the most famous of the many Jews who joined the fight to bring down apartheid."

"If ever a writer had a grasp of the umbilical connection between individual experience and historical possibility, it's Nadine Gordimer. The miracle of the Nobel prize is not only that someone got it who deserved it, but that the writer of our century who portrays most insistently how people wrestle with, resist and create political change was rewarded for her vision. An existentialist with an emphasis on both political commitment and efficacy, Gordimer is one of the few writers to depict the activist life. No surprise then to find her quoting Camus: "It is from the moment when I shall no longer be more than a writer that I shall cease to write." So far it's not a problem. A leftist publicly critical of communism since the early eighties, she named the challenge "to love truth enough, to pick up the blood-dirtied, shamed cause of the left, and attempt to recreate it in accordance with what it was meant to be, not what sixty-five years of human power-perversion have made of it." Comparisons with Doris Lessing, that other vast-minded leftist white woman writer from Southern Africa (Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia), seem inevitable; but Lessing left Africa and political vision. Gordimer stayed...Typical Gordimer to come out with the word, and with the truth of the character's fleeting but not trivial dilemma; typical to mix farts with colonialism. Nothing is off limits, but she's no cynic. A fierce moralist who insists on change, Gordimer summons us to our best selves: "There is no forgetting how we could live if only we could find the way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal.""

"Nadine Gordimer writes about black people with such astounding sensibilities and sensitivity-not patronizing, not romantic, just real. And Eudora Welty does the same thing. Lillian Hellman has done it. Now, we might categorize these women as geniuses of a certain sort, but if they can write about it, it means that it is possible. They didn't say, "Oh, my God, I can't write about black people"; it didn't stop them. There are white people who do respond that way though, assuming there's some huge barrier. But if you can relate to Beowolf and Jesus Christ when you read about them, it shouldn't be so difficult to relate to black literature."

"(whom of those you have read recently have you found impressive?) AO: The South Africans: Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and André Brink."

""No one knows where the end of suffering will begin," writes Nadine Gordimer about the 1976 Soweto schoolchildren's uprising in her novel Burger's Daughter."

"Politics, both large and small-scale, was Nadine's subject. Speaking the truth was her passion. She wrote about injustices not only in the bad old days, but in the new. She was a model of what an engaged writer can achieve, and that's what makes her my hero."

"She remained true to her art but she also knew that the politics of struggle gave energy to her art; she was born on the other side of the colour line, but she built bridges across it. Speaking truth to power was the real power of her art. She may have passed on, but her 90 years among us were a blessing. Her presence and energy are forever alive in my memory. She remains a kindred spirit for, beyond the writing and activism, she was an unwavering supporter of writing in African languages. The quantity and quality of her literary output – from short stories and novels to essays – earned her many awards but, in the end, the biggest award for her was the affection and the respect she got from people of all races in South Africa and across the globe. Her written words will forever be an integral part of the collective memory of the world."

"She writes marvelous novels"

"Once Jews no longer obeyed the imperatives of their religion, they were virtually obliged to create new forms of identity, turning accommodation from means to end. Literature was a proving ground for the reinvention of the self. One-tenth of the Nobel Prize winners for literature in the twentieth century were born Jews, but only two of them-Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1966) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978)-wrote in a Jewish language and only about half thought of themselves as Jews. Paul Heyse (1910), Nellie Sachs (1966), and Elias Canetti (1981) wrote in German; Henri Bergson (1927) in French; Boris Pasternak (1958) and Joseph Brodsky (1987) in Russian; and Saul Bellow (1976) and Nadine Gordimer (1991) in English."

"Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether."

"It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth."

"In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role."

"[Being peppered with invitations to travel far and wide to give lectures] has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world."

"As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day."

"To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. … It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal-products industry falls short: traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that human beings are capable of?"

"A dictum [Beckett] quotes from his favourite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) suggests his overall stance toward the political: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don’t invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power."

"Light in tone, the novel [Murphy] is Beckett’s response to the therapeutic orthodoxy that the patient should learn to engage with the larger world on the world’s terms."

"The activity of writing, then, is not to be distinguished from the activity of self-exploration. It consists in contemplating the sea of internal images, discerning connections, and setting these out in grammatical sentences (“I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences,” says Murnane, whose views on grammar are firm, even pedantic.)"

"The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble."

"Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of a dependent people, I was opposed to civilization..."

"Will we live to regret this blood spent so lavishly on the sand?"

"Truly the world should belong to singers and dancers."

"I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men.”"

"Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets."

"Truly, man was not made to live alone!"

"Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten."

"How can I accept that disaster has overtaken my life when the world continues to move so tranquilly through its cycles?"

"It would cost little to march them out into the desert . . . to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions.”"

"It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain."

"It is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation."

"But more often in the very act of caressing her I am overcome with sleep as if polelaxed, fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body, and wake an hour or two later dizzy, confused, thirsty. These dreamless spells are like death to me, or enchantment, black, outside time."

"We have been here more than a hundred years, we have reclaimed land from the desert and built irrigation works and planted fields and built solid homes and put a wall around our town, but they still think of us as visitors, transients."

"There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars."

"I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves."

"How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman’s body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!"

"I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them."

"I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish."

"This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere."

"I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see."

"There seemed nothing to do but live."

"He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end."

"Do any of us believe in what we are doing here? I doubt it. Her NCO husband least of all. We are given an old racetrack and a quantity of barbed wire and told to effect a change in men's souls. Not being experts on the soul but assuming cautiously that it has some connection with the body, we set our captives to doing pushups and marching back and forth."

"He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of war. An unbearing, unborn creature."

"Though this is a large country, so large that you would think there would be space for everyone, what I have learned from life tells me that it is hard to keep out of the camps. Yet I am convinced there are areas that lie between the camps and belong to no camp, not even to the catchment areas of the camps — certain mountaintops, for example, certain islands in the middle of swamps, certain arid strips where human beings may not find it worth their while to live. I am looking for such a place in order to settle there, perhaps only till things improve, perhaps forever. I am not so foolish, however, as to imagine that I can rely on maps and roads to guide me. Therefore I have chosen you to show me the way."

"You want to stop on the expressway, you pull fifty metres off the roadside...Anything nearer, you can get shot, no warning, no questions asked.'"

"Perhaps, [Michael] thought, it was better when one did not have to rely on other people"

"Michael K sat ... watching his mother polish other people's floors, learning to be quiet."

"If she was going to die, she would at least die under blue skies"

"Though he had no more business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital."

"He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help."

"But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we've got here?"

"They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die"

"He could not imagine ... driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land"

"His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong"

"Can't you tell the difference between a thin man and a skeleton?"

"There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas"

"As time passed, however, I slowly began to see the originality of the resistance you offered"

"I discovered out in the country ... that there is time enough for everything"

"At last I could row no further. My hands were blistered, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard. With slow strokes, my long hair floating about me, like a flower of the sea, like an anemone, like a jellyfish of the kind you see in the waters of Brazil, I swam towards the strange island, for a while swimming as I had rowed, against the current, then all at once free of its grip, carried by the waves into the bay and on to the beach."

"But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place: a great rocky hill with a flat top, rising sharply from the sea on all sides except one, dotted with drab bushes that never flowered and never shed their leaves."

"Crushed under his soles whole clusters of the thorns that had pierced my skin."

"The stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of)."

"Would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, he no longer knew for sure what truth, what fancy."

"Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering."

"At last I could row no further."

"But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate."

"Not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway by heart."

"I would rather be the author of my story than have lies told about me."

"It was I who shared Cruso's bed and closed Cruso's eyes."

"A being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso."

"To live in silence is to live like the whales."

"The less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like tombs."

"In a sea of fallen leaves we sit, she and I, two substantial beings."

"He is the child of his silence."

"I do not love him, but he is mine."

"We can bring [the island] to life only by setting it within a larger story."

"Cannibals are no less dull than Englishmen."

"I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story."

"This is the place where bodies are their own signs."

"I will leave behind my terraces and walls," he said. "They will be enough. They will be more than enough.”"

"Perhaps they wanted to prevent him from ever telling his story, who he was, where his home lay, how it came about that he was taken."

"I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of a castaway is a castaway at heart"

"Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe. That is my entreaty."

"To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes…"

"To hold us in check when our desires grow immoderate. As long as our desires are moderate we have no need of laws."

"My thoughts ran to Friday… Had I not been there to restrain him, would he in his hunger have eaten the babe? I told myself I did him wrong to think of him as a cannibal or worse, a devourer of the dead. But Cruso had planted the seed in my mind, and now I could not look on Friday’s lips without calling to mind what mean must once have passed them."

"I am not a story, Mr Foe…I choose rather to tell of the Island, of myself and Crusoe and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire."

"This is the place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday."

"Seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beast he has slain."

"If Providence were to watch over all of us,” said Cruso, “who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometimes wake and sometimes sleep, as lower creatures do.”"

"When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: of being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso."

"To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades."

"Day by day the wind picks at the roof and the weeds creep across the terraces."

"I tell myself I talked to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will."

"It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau."

"You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we lead on Cruso’s island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day."

"“You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”"

"To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force. I mean the executioner and his assistants, both great and small. If I were the Irish woman, I should rest most uneasy in my grave knowing to what interpreter the story of my last hours has been consigned."

"If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain."

"But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies have their own signs. It is the home of Friday."

"The new wife is a lazy big boned voluptuous feline woman…"

"unused body now dusty, dry, unsavoury"

"I am… a farmgirl… not unaware that there is a hole between my legs that has never been filled."

"“I am a child,” she tells him, “Despite my years, I am an old child, a sinister old child full of stale juices. Someone should make a woman of me… , someone should make a hole in me to let the old juices run out.”"

"Coming to the farm from Worcester, where Coloured people seem to have to beg for whatever they get, he is relieved at how correct and formal relations are between his uncle and the volk. Each morning, his uncle confers with his two men about the day's tasks. He does not give them orders. Instead he proposes the tasks that need to be done, as if dealing cards on a table; his men deal their own cards too. In between, there are pauses, long, reflective silences in which nothing happens."

"The secret and sacred word that binds him to the farm is 'belong'. Out in the veld by himself he can breathe the word aloud: I belong on the farm. What he really believes but does not utter, what he keeps to himself for fear that the spell will end, is a different form of the word: I belong to the farm. He tells no one because the word is misunderstood so easily, turned so easily to its inverse: The farm belongs to me. The farm will never belong to him, he will never be more than a visitor: he accepts that."

"Sometimes when he is among the sheep — when they have been rounded up to be dipped, and are penned tight and cannot get away — he wants to whisper to them, warn them of what lies in store. But then in their yellow eyes he catches a glimpse of something that silences him: a resignation, a foreknowledge not only of what happens to sheep at the hands of Ros behind the shed, but of what awaits them at the end of their long, thirsty ride to Cape Town on the transport lorry. They know it all, down to the finest detail, and yet they submit. They have calculated the price and are prepared to pay it — the price of being on earth, the price of being alive."

"The boy is special, Aunt Annie told his mother, and his mother in turn told him. But what kind of special? No one ever says."

"He is angry at his mother for not having normal children and making them live a normal life."

"It is the mother and children who make up the core and the husband only a contributor to the economy as a paying lodger might be."

"The nearest shops from where they live are a mile away along a bleak eucalyptus-lined road."

"Although he devoted hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings, and intentions to each other.' His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul."

"Isaacs has a cheap Bic pen in his hand. He runs his fingers down the shaft, inverts it, runs his fingers down the shaft, over and over, in a motion that is mechanical rather than impatient."

"Talking to Petrus is like punching a bag of sand. 'Are you giving him up?' 'Yes, I am giving him up.'"

"Is he happy? By most measurements, yes, he believes he is. However, he has not forgotten the last chorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead."

"The company of women made of him a lover of women and, to a certain extent, a womanizer.""

"Why? Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it."

"Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away."

"Scandal. A pity that must be his theme, but he is in no state to improvise."

"That is how it begins."

"... the whole thing is disgraceful from beginning to end. Disgraceful and vulgar."

"Confessions, apologies: why this thirst for abasement? A hush falls. They circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off."

"It reminds me too much of Mao’s China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology."

"What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it."

"Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them."

"You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through."

"Because he takes pleasure in her, because his pleasure is unfailing, an affection has grown up in him for her. To some degree, he believes, this affection is reciprocated. Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin."

"(Chapter 1)"

"He knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone."

"As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away."

"(Chapter 2)"

"Note that we are not asked to condemn this being with the mad heart, this being with whom there is some­ thing constitutionally wrong."

"(Chapter 4 )"

"Don’t expect sympathy from me, David, and don’t expect sympathy from anyone else either. No sympathy, no mercy, not in this day and age. Everyone’s hand will be against you, and why not? Really, how could you"

"(Chapter 5 )"

"I’m dubious, Lucy. It sounds suspiciously like community service. It sounds like someone trying to make reparation for past misdeeds.’"

"(Chapter 9 )"

"My case rests on the rights of desire,’ he says. ‘On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.’"

"(Chapter 11)"

"Spoken without irony, the words stay with him and will not go away."

"(Chapter 12)"

"The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka—Poles, for the most part—said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in a general way they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake."

"I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched."

"What he dreads is that, during a lull in the conversation, someone will come up with what he calls The Question—“What led you, Mrs. Costello, to become a vegetarian?”—and that she will then get on her high horse and produce what he and Norma call The Plutarch Response. … The response in question comes from Plutarch's moral essays. His mother has it by heart; he can reproduce it only imperfectly. “You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, am astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds.” Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet; after that, there is no knowing what will happen."

"“But your own vegetarianism, Mrs. Costello,” says President Garrard, pouring oil on troubled waters: “it comes out of moral conviction, does it not?” “No, I don't think so,” says his mother. “It comes out of a desire to save my soul.” Now there truly is a silence, broken only by the clink of plates as the waitresses set baked Alaskas before them. “Well, I have a great respect for it,” says Garrard. “As a way of life.” “I'm wearing leather shoes,” says his mother. “I'm carrying a leather purse. I wouldn't have overmuch respect if I were you.” “Consistency,” murmurs Garrard. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Surely one can draw a distinction between eating meat and wearing leather.” “Degrees of obscenity,” she replies."

"It was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies."

"“It's been such a short visit, I haven't had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.” She watches the wipers wagging back and forth. “A better explanation,” she says, “is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.” “What is it you can't say?” “It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, ‘Yes, it's nice, isn't it? Polish-Jewish skin it's made of, we find that's best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.’ And then I go to the bathroom and the soap-wrapper says, ‘Treblinka— 100% human stearate.’ Am I dreaming, I say to myself?”"

"Yet whole days pass in a fog of grey exhaustion. He curses himself for letting himself be sucked back into an affair that costs him so much. If this is what having a mistress entails, how do Picasso and the others get by? He simply has not the energy to run from lecture to lecture, job to job, then when the day is done to pay attention to a woman who veers between euphoria and spells of the blackest gloom in which she thrashes around brooding on a lifetime's grudges."

"He would like to believe there is enough pity in the air for black people and their lot, enough of a desire to deal honourably with them, to make up for the cruelty of the laws. But he knows it is not so. Between black and white there is a gulf fixed. Deeper than pity, deeper than honourable dealings, deeper even than goodwill, lies an awareness on both sides that people like Paul and himself, with their pianos and violins, are here on this earth, the earth of South Africa, on the shakiest of pretexts. [...] In fact, from Africans in general, even from Coloured people, he feels a curious, amused tenderness emanating: a sense that he must be a simpleton, in need of protection, if he imagined he can get by on the basis of straight looks and honourable dealings when the ground beneath his feet is soaked with blood and the vast backward depth of history rings with shouts of anger. — Chapter 2, page 17."

"His refuge from IBM is the cinema. [...] He goes to the whole of an Antonioni season. In a film called L'Eclisse a woman wanders through the streets of a sunstruck, deserted city. She is disturbed, anguished. What she is anguished about he cannot quite define; her face reveals nothing. The woman is Monica Vitti. With her perfect legs and sensual lips and abstracted look, Monica Vitti haunts him. He falls in love with her. — Chapter 6, page 48."

"At IBM he has to keep his fantasies of Monica Vitti to himself, and the rest of his arty pretensions too. [...] For reasons that are not clear to him, he has been adopted as a chum by a fellow programmer named Bill Briggs. [...] Whereas the other programmers speak with unplaceable grammar-school accents and start the day by flipping to the financial pages of the Telegraph to check the share prices, Bill Briggs has a marked London accent and stores his money in a building society account."

"He does not as yet know England well enough to do England in prose. He is not even sure he can do the parts of London he is familiar with, the London of crowds trudging to work, of cold and rain, of bedsitters with curtainless windows and forty-watt bulbs. — Chapter 7, page 63."

"But if he is going to write prose then he may have to go the whole hog and become a Jamesian. Henry James shows one how to rise above mere nationality. [...] People in James do not have to pay the rent; they certainly do not have to hold down jobs; all they are required to do is to have super-subtle conversations whose effect is to bring about tiny shifts of power, shifts so minute as to be invisible to all but the practised eye. When enough such shifts have taken place, the balance of power between the personages of the story is (Voilà!) revealed to have suddenly and irreversibly changed. And that is that: the story has fulfilled its charge and can be brought to an end. — Chapter 8, page 64."

"Once upon a time, when he was still an innocent child, he believed that cleverness was the only yardstick that mattered, that as long as he was clever enough he would attain everything he desired. Going to university put him in his place. The university showed him he was not the cleverest, not by a long chalk. — Chapter 8, page 65."

"He does not see what the British have against the Russians. Britain and Russia have been on the same side in all the wars he knows of since 1854. The Russians have never threatened to invade Britain. Why then are the British siding with the Americans, who behave like bullies in Europe as all over the world? It is not as though the British actually like the Americans. — Chapter 10, page 83."

"[...] he can see no reason why people need to dance. Dancing makes sense only when it is interpreted as something else, something that people prefer not to admit. That something else is the real thing: the dance is merely a cover. Inviting a girl to dance stands for inviting her to have intercourse; and dancing is a miming and foreshadowing of intercourse. So obvious are the correspondences that he wonders why people bother with dancing at all. Why the dressing up, why the ritual motions; why the huge sham? — Chapter 11, pages 89–90."

"At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode — he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which — catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended. — Chapter 11, page 93."

"Hitherto he has found in Western music, in Bach above all, everything he needs. Now he encounters something that is not in Bach, though there are intimations of it: a joyous yielding of the reasoning, comprehending mind to the dance of the fingers. He hunts through record shops, and in one of them finds an LP of a sitar player named Ustad Vilayat Khan, with his brother — a younger brother, to judge from the picture — on a veena, and an unnamed tabla player. He does not have a gramophone of this own, but he is able to listen to the first ten minutes in the shop. It is all there: the hovering exploration of tone-sequences, the quivering emotion, the ecstatic rushes. He cannot believe his good fortune. A new continent and all for a mere nine shillings! He takes the record back to his room, packs it away between sleeves of cardboard till the day he will able to listen to it again. — Chapter 11, pages 93–4."

"How can anyone in England understand what brings people from the far corners of the earth to die on a wet, miserable island which they detest and to which they have no ties? — Chapter 18, page 148."

"It continues to astound him that people can be as clever as people are in the computer industry, yet have no outside interests beyond cars and house prices. — Chapter 18, page 149."

"He is here, with her, out of love. *He cannot imagine her getting through this trial without him at her side.”"

"She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man."

"She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying."

"A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him…We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition."

"They lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part."

"Because Costello is his mother’s maiden name, and because he has never seen any reason to broadcast his connection with her, it was not known at the time of the invitation that Elizabeth Costello, the Australian writer, had a family connection in the Appleton community. He would have preferred that state of affairs to continue.”"

"“Norma and his mother have never liked each other. Probably his mother would have chosen not to like any woman he married.”"

"“His mother is entitled to her convictions, he believes. If she wants to spend her declining years making propaganda against cruelty to animals, that is her right.”"

"She no longer believes very strongly in belief... Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done."

"But truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love."

"Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?"

"Paul here is unhappy because unhappiness is second nature to him but more particularly because he has not the faintest idea of how to bring about his heart's desire. And I am unhappy because nothing is happening. Four people in four corners, moping, like tramps in Beckett, and myself in the middle, wasting time, being wasted by time."

"Why does love, even such love as he claims to practise, need the spectacle of beauty to bring it to life? What, in the abstract, do shapely legs have to do with love, or for that matter with desire? Or is that just the nature of nature, about which one does not ask questions?"

"Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths."

"Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and the desperate. Around them, guards in olive green uniforms prance with demonic energy and glee, cattle prods and billy-clubs at the ready. They touch the prisoners with the prods and the prisoners leap; they wrestle prisoners to the ground and shove the clubs up their anuses and the prisoners go into spasms. In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs. One day it will be done, though not by me. It may even be a hit in London and Berlin and New York. It will have absolutely no effect on the people it targets, who could not care less what ballet audiences think of them."

"As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king’s firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict."

"If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian."

"Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary."

"The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation."

"The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: How can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do. If you wish to counter the man in the street, it cannot be by appeal to moral principles, much less by demanding that people should run their lives in such a way that there are no contradictions between what they say and what they do. Ordinary life is full of contradictions; ordinary people are used to accommodating them. Rather, you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fraudulent."

"So when you climbed, he said, you had to go careful. You had to watch your older brother and follow close his moves. You had to think back on every step before you took it. Remembering hard the whole way up. ... "And if you can’t memory right," he said, "you lose.""

"We had been stopped by the cops before. There was a routine to it all: we knew that if you carefully played along you’d eventually be released, if not with your dignity, then at least with your skin. But that night we sensed an urgency we hadn’t experienced before. With the blinding headlights upon me, I couldn’t process the commands."

"The world around us was named Scarborough. It had once been called “Scarberia,” a wasteland on the outskirts of a sprawling city. But now, as we were growing up in the early ’80s, in the heated language of a changing nation, we heard it called other names: Scarlem, Scarbistan. We lived in Scar-bro, a suburb that had mushroomed up and yellowed, browned, and blackened into life."

"Always, there were stories on TV and in the papers of gangs, killings in bad neighborhoods, predators roaming close. One morning, I peered with Francis into a newspaper box to read a headline about the latest terror and caught in the glass the reflection of our own faces."

"“You know,” he said, “you’ve got to work on things. … Like stepping into Desirea’s the way you did. Like always looking so unsure. You’ve got to be cooler about things, and not put everything out on your face all the time. You’ve got to carry yourself better and think about your look. Doesn’t matter how poor you are.”"

"In Desirea’s, you postured but you also played. You showed up every one of your dictated roles and fates. Our parents had come from Trinidad and Jamaica and Barbados, from Sri Lanka and Poland and Somalia and Vietnam. They worked shit jobs, struggled with rent, were chronically tired, and often pushed just as chronically tired notions about identity and respectability. But in Desirea’s, different styles and kinships were possible. You found new language, you caught the gestures, you kept the meanings close as skin."

"Would you agree that Francis had a bit of a reputation? Did he sometimes exhibit unpredictable moods? Would you agree, Michael, that your brother possessed a history of violence?"

"Francis had always protected me. It was his instinct. He saw the vulnerability, understood it all too well. But in that final moment in Desirea's, he had tried to protect another. When a cop with his hand on his holstered gun grabbed Jelly and tried to pull him away, Francis had panicked. "Don't touch him," he'd said, reaching to still the weapon. It was a gesture with history, but unreadable by those around him holding power. The authorities had investigated, interviewed witnesses, pronounced their conclusions. "They called it lawful," I told Aisha. And what else could we do but each look away?"

"I return to Mother's stretcher, and she's sitting up now, wearing a hospital gown as neatly as she can make it seem. When she reads my face, she smooths her hair, sits up straight, the paper beneath her making soft crinkling sounds. "It is a new day," she says firmly."

"Can we visit it soon?" Aisha asks. "It's supposed to be warm this weekend." [...] "What do you say?" Aisha presses. "The pathway down should be clear enough to get close to the creek. We'll be sure to go slow, Ruth. Maybe we could borrow a wheelchair. Jelly? Are you in?"

"I admire writers like J.M. Coetzee, Nuruddin Farah, Michael Ondaatje, I can name several."

"(whom of those you have read recently have you found impressive?) AO: The South Africans: Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and André Brink."

"We hear a great deal about sex nowadays; it is possible to overestimate its importance, because there are always people who pay it little attention or who apparently manage, like Sir Isaac Newton, to get along, without giving it a thought."

"Who strolls so late, for mugs a bait, In the mists of Maida Vale, Sauntering past a stucco gate Fallen, but hardly frail?"

"The commonplace needs no defence, Dullness is in the critic’s eyes, Without a licence life evolves From some dim phase its own surprise;Under these yellow-twinkling elms, Behind these hedges trimly shorn, As in a stable once, so here It may be born, it may be born."

"It's so utterly out of the world! So fearfully wide of the mark! A Robinson Crusoe existence will pall On that unexplored side of the Park — Not a soul will be likely to call!"

"Out of that bungled, unwise war An alp of unforgiveness grew."

"On a sofa upholstered in panther skin Mona did researches in ."

"A family portrait not too stale to record Of a pleasant old buffer, nephew to a lord, Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword, And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad: Just like an old liberal Between the wars."

"Oh, the twenties and the thirties were not otherwise designed Than other times when blind men into ditches led the blind, When the rich mouse ate the cheese and the poor mouse got the rind, And man, the self-destroyer, was not lucid in his mind."

"With first-rate sherry flowing into second-rate whores, And third-rate conversation without one single pause: Just like a young couple Between the wars."

"A pleasant old duffer, nephew to a lord, Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword, And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad: Just like an old liberal Between the wars."

"When her guests were awash with champagne and with gin She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin: An abstemious man would reel at her look As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book."

"A rose-red sissy half as old as time."

"'Look who's here! Do come and help us fiddle while Rome burns!'"

"So never say to D'Arcy, 'Be your age!' — He'd shrivel up at once or turn to stone."

"Brzeska and Brooke were among those she knew And she lived long enough to meet Lawrences, too, D. H. and T. E. – she who'd known R. L. S., Talked to Hardy of Kim, and to Kipling of Tess!"

"His most celebrated poems are, of course, the historical-satirical ballads (A or even X certificate) in which a person or period is "hit off", in the sense both of being preserved and hit for six."

"His poetry may be divided into comic extravaganza on the one hand, and more personal work on the other. There is no one like him in the world in the former genre; as a "light poet" he is preferable to John Betjeman – as fluent in traditional forms, his work is never vitiated by refuge in the poetical or high sentimental, and his choice of words is subtler, funnier and altogether sharper. In his other vein Plomer is fastidious, reticent, elegant and the author of some memorable and moving lines."

"If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank, history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly, threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas that is their life. For, having primed it, they do not know where to start, how to make a mark. They are alone in the world, a small new island of whiteness. Or so they think; they do not know, or perhaps they do not want to know, that the neighbourhood is full of people like them. Thus they are steeped in its silence."

"The newspapers were always full of stories about abandoned children found tied up or living under the bed because their families were ashamed of them on account of the colour of their skin."

"On the other hand, when I was at school, I remember kids in my class boasting about the members of their family who had 'turned white'."

"I was hot-headed, impatient, I just wanted to leave the whole oppressiveness of my own culture far behind."

"I have a ghost existence here: my whole intellectual and emotional life is in South Africa."

"I'm very, very contrary. And I want to be in control, which is what informs my attitude to publishing, editing, being interviewed. I set high standards too: as a reader, I don't read any poor novels, so I'm always aware of how much my own work falls flat by comparison. And perhaps it's because I grew up in South Africa, and it was easy there for people like me to grow up with a consciousness of inferiority."

"After several false starts, self-reflexivity offered a solution –– I decided to exploit my inability to write, to fictionalise the writer herself, and to make the actual writing of Pringle’s history the framework of the novel."

"Hinza Marossi, Pringle’s adopted son, was of interest from the outset. Not only is his story recorded in a poem, but I wanted to explore the question of interracial adoption under colonial conditions as well as what that story looks like from Hinza’s point of view."

"The character Mary Prince was an obvious choice because her slave narrative was the first by a woman. It was published in London by Pringle in spite of opposition and litigation by British people who benefitted from slavery. He was also reviled by fellow Scottish settlers at the Cape, who persisted with the myth that slavery in South Africa was an altogether more benign affair."

"Nicholas Greene, a character from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (one of my favourite novels) is a more controversial choice, and really I don’t remember how he entered the story. But I was drawn to the fact that he is a time-traveller and to his fictionality as opposed to the other real historical figures. Thus he enabled me to address yet another level of the real within my fictional account. Given that the novel is about the writing of Pringle’s story, Greene also offered another version of the writer."

"I’m drawn to a subject, do the necessary research, and then the problem of how to represent that subject arises. A struggle of trying to write something that may or may not lead towards a solution, and really it’s a matter of faith, of believing that something will come out of the daily routine."

"There are periods of giving up on the project, then inexplicably I return to wrestle with my material until finally the first draft shapes itself through the process of writing. Then follows many more drafts, less torturous than the first, in which I straighten out events and try to refine the prose, but doubts about the value of what I’m doing persist ––I am after all not read by many; in fact, my readership is more or less limited to students of Postcolonial Writing."

"But, you can’t ever think of yourself as belonging in Europe. In terms then of an interior life, I remained South African, through teaching and writing about South Africa – both fiction and literary criticism. I returned for a few years and taught at UWC but then I couldn’t manage the family separation, and returned to Scotland."

"I imagined that when I retired from teaching, I would live mainly in South Africa, but in the meantime the promise of liberation has been hollowed out and I’m not attracted to the pathologies of historical colonialism that persist. Still, I do spend a couple of months every year in the Cape and return to the north with great reluctance."

"We had two masters of the spoken word in South Africa, General Smuts and his lieutenant J. H. Hofmeyr, whose life I wrote. Smuts spoke in a high-pitched voice, not the kind of voice that one would expect from a famous soldier, but he too could hold an audience in the hollow of his hand, partly because he was Smuts, partly because he could say nothing trite or shallow, partly because he knew how to speak to ordinary men and women."

"I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."

"The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief—and again I ask your pardon—that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are the tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten."

"I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men . . . desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it. . . . I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."

"This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. . . . Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end."

"The truth is that our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of high assurance and desperate anxiety, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions. Allow me a minute. . . ."

"And now for all the people of Africa, the beloved country. Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, God save Africa. But he would not see that salvation. It lay afar off, because men were afraid of it. Because, to tell the truth, they were afraid of him, and his wife, and Msimangu, and the young demonstrator. And what was there evil in their desires, in their hunger? That man should walk upright in the land where they were born, and be free to use the fruits of the earth, what was there evil in it? . . . They were afraid because they were so few. And such fear could not be cast out, but by love."

"The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again."

"...there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power."

"Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much."

"Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering."

"I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering."

"Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey,a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house."

"The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just."

"The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions."

"Happy the eyes that can close."

"For who can stop the heart from breaking?"

"I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good for their country, come together to work for it. I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."

"It is not permissible for us to go on destroying the family life when we know that we are destroying it."

"Indeed, mother, you are always our helper."

"For mines are for men, not for money. And money is not something to go mad about, and throw your hat into the air for. Money is for food and clothes and comfort, and a visit to the pictures. Money is to make happy the lives of children. Money is for security, and for dreams, and for hopes, and for purposes. Money is for buying the fruits of the earth, of the land where you were born."

"We do not work for men. We work for the land and the people. We do not even work for money."

"There are voices crying what must be done, a hundred, a thousand voices. But what do they help if one seeks for counsel, for one cries this, and one cries that, and another cries something that is neither this nor that."

"...let us sell our labour for what it is worth. And if an industry cannot buy our labour, let that industry die. But let us not sell our labour cheap to keep an industry alive."

"I do this not because I am courageous and honest, but because it is the only way to end the conflict of my deepest soul."

"The humble man reached in his pocket for his sacred book, and began to read. It was this world alone that was certain."

"He had come to tell his brother that power corrupts, that a man who fights for justice must himself be cleansed and purified, that love is greater than force. And none of these things had he done. God have mercy on me, Christ have mercy on me. He turned to the door, but it was locked and bolted. Brother had shut out brother, from the same womb had they come."

"...Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom."

"I say we shall always have native crime to fear until the native people of this country have worthy goals to work for. For it is only because they see neither purpose nor goal that they turn to drink and crime and prostitution."

"For what can men do when so many have grown lawless? Who can enjoy the lovely land, who can enjoy the seventy years, and the sun that pours down on the earth, when there is fear in the heart? Who can walk quietly in the shadow of the jacarandas, when their beauty is grown to danger? Who can lie peacefully abed, while the darkness holds some secret? What lovers can lie sweetly under the stars, when menace grows with the measure of their seclusion?"

"...And the heart is black too, and the world is black, and one can tell oneself that it will pass, but these are only words that one speaks to oneself, for while it is there it is no comfort that it will pass."

"But to punish and not to restore, that is the greatest of all offences."

"...when a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive."

"...if man takes unto himself God's right to punish, then he must also take upon himself God's promise to restore."

"For a man can be happy and free, and be cast down by a word. And a woman can be in the depths of misery, and be lifted up by an asking for forgiveness. So one goes from joy to dejection, and hurt to exaltation, and certainty to doubt, as when with some summer storm the whole world is dark and sombre, till suddenly the sun breaks through, almost at its setting, and bathes tree and grass and hill in green and yellow light, the link of which, as the English say, was never seen on land or sea."

"Why a man should have great strengths and great weakness I do not understand. For the first call him to honour, and the second to dishonour; and the first to fame and the second to destruction"

"The light of the body is the eye, and when the eye is true then is the body full of light, but when the eye is evil, then is the body dark."

"A word from you is twice as severe because it comes from you."

"....for the black moods and the angers and the cold withdrawals that robbed her of the simple joys of her quiet and humble life."

"Like many others in the United States, South Africa came into my field of vision when I read Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton's best-selling novel. Reading Cry the Beloved Country may have been the first time I caught an objective glimpse of myself, my family, and the land we cherished and considered ours (although we were sharecroppers, my paternal grandparents had owned land). I began to understand that we were settlers on stolen land, with the native people separate and invisible, that realization dawning against the distant drum of the civil rights movement coming ever closer to home. Yet it was not a sense of guilt I felt; how could I, a dirt-poor half-breed myself, feel guilty in any terms not proscribed by the Baptist preacher? What I felt instead was a sense of enormous responsibility, and that felt liberating, made me feel in control of my destiny, made me feel I could change the world and make a better place for people like me to live in, liberation of the damned as Frantz Fanon put it."

"Cry the Beloved Country was another Uncle Tom's Cabin [1852]- in Africa. The failure in imaginative comprehension of the African character in European fiction lies in the fact that the African is not seen in an active causal-effect relationship with a significant past."

"The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted ‘karroo’ bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the milk-bushes with their long, finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird and almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.”"

"And you do not need to. When you are seventeen this Boer-woman will go; you will have this farm and everything that is upon it for your own; but I,’ said Lyndall, ‘will have nothing. I must learn.’”"

"Very tenderly the old man looked at him. He saw not the bloated body nor the evil face of the man; but, as it were, under deep disguise and fleshly concealment, the form that long years of dreaming had made very real to him."

"It is delightful to be a woman; but every man thanks the Lord devoutly that he isn’t one."

"We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World."

"This dirty little world full of confusion, and the blue rag, stretched overhead for a sky, is so low we could touch it with our hand."

"Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls, marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world."

"Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it—but there is."

"What need had he of experience? Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour."

"And so, it comes to pass in time, that the earth ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up and round reverentially. Nothing is despicable—all is meaning-full; nothing is small—all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension, not too small. And so, it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first a small blue rag stretched out over us, and so low that our hands might touch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurable blue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again."

""And she said, in a voice strangely unlike her own: “I see the vision of a poor, weak soul striving after good. It was not cut short, and in the end it learnt, through tears and much pain, that holiness is an infinite compassion for others; that greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them; that”—She moved her white hand and laid it on her forehead—“happiness is a great love and much serving. It was not cut short; and it loved what it had learnt—it loved—and—”"

"“All things on earth have their price, and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your heart.”"

"“Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour.”"

"“[O]nly the sea is like a human being . . .always moving, always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests; it is always wanting, wanting, wanting. It hurries on; and then it creeps back slowly without having reached, moaning. It is always asking a question and it never gets the answer.”"

"“When the curtain falls no one is ready”"

"“I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man's foot; and I do not so greatly admire the crying of babies”"

"“If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?”"

"“The bees are very attentive to the flowers until their honey is done, and then they fly over them. I don't know if the flowers feel grateful to the bees, they are great fools if they do.”"

"“There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.”"

"“So age succeeds age, and dream succeeds dream, and of the joy of the dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth."

"“I am a man who believes nothing, hopes nothing, fears nothing, feels nothing. I am beyond the pale of humanity [...]”"

"“The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the only education we have and which they cannot take from us”"

"“I think,' said Lyndall, 'that he is like a thorn-tree, which grows up very quietly, without any one's caring for it, and one day suddenly breaks out into yellow blossoms.”"

"“why am I so alone, so hard, so cold? I am so weary of myself! It is eating my soul to its core,--self, self, self! I cannot bear this life! I cannot breathe, I cannot live! Will nothing free me from myself?' She pressed her cheek agains the wooden post. 'I want to love! I want something great and pure to lift me to itself! Dear old man, I cannot bear it any more! I am so cold, so hard, so hard; will no one help me!”"

"“I have discovered that of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls' boarding-school is the worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate.”"

"“Why hate, and struggle, and fight? Let is be as it would.”"

"“For a little sould that cries oout aloud for continued personal existence for itseld and its beloved, there is no help. For the sould which know itself no more as a unit, but as part of the Universal Unit of which the Beloved also is part; which feels within itself the throb of the Universal Life; for that soul there is not death.”"

"“I have sought,” he said, “for long years I have laboured; but I have not found her. I have not rested, I have not repined, and I have not seen her; now my strength is gone. Where I lie down worn out other men will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will climb; by the stairs that I have built they will mount. They will never know the name of the man who made them. At the clumsy work they will laugh; when the stones roll they will curse me. But they will mount, and on my work; they will climb, and by my stair! They will find her, and through me! And no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself.”"

"“On the path to truth, at every step, you set your foot down on your own heart.”"

"When Olive Schreiner, aged seventeen, wrote the South African Farm, some among her friends were disappointed she had not called more upon her imagination and described wild and thrilling adventures, as her country might have suggested. "Such works," she says in her Preface to this wonderful book, "are best written in Piccadilly or the Strand; there the gifts of creative imagination, untrammelled by contact with fact, may spread their wings. Those brilliant phases and shapes are not for her to portray. Sadly she must squeeze the colour from her brush. She must paint what lies before her.""

"The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner is often thought of as being the beginning of South African literature. She stood more or less alone."

"When a lady chooses to change her mind, a gentleman would consider it no more than her privilege, and not badger her about it. (The Land of Green Ginger, 1937)"

"It's only education that turns a man away from his tribe."

"I don’t care about people. I don’t care about anything, not even the white man. I want to feel what it is like to live in a free country and then maybe some of the evils in my life will correct themselves."

"He sat quite still, staring ahead with calm, empty eyes, and he looked so lordly for all his tattered coat and rough cowhide shoes that Makhaya smiled and walked up to him and greeted him."

"The country presented overwhelming challenges, he said, not only because the rainfall was poor but because the majority of the people engaged in subsistence farming were using primitive techniques that ruined the land. All this had excited his interest."

"But witch doctors were human, and nothing, however odd and perverse, need be feared if it was human."

"Why should men be brought up with a false sense of superiority over women? People can respect me if they wish, but only if I earn it."

"It was the mentality of the old hag that ruined a whole continent - some sort of clinging, ancestral, tribal belief that a man was nothing more than a grovelling sex organ, that there was no such thing as privacy of soul and body, and that no ordinary man would hesitate to jump on a mere child."

"Well-educated men often come to the crossroad of life .. One road might lead to fame and importance, and another might lead to peace of mind. It's the road of peace of mind that I'm seeking. ["

"In this country there is a great tolerance of evil. It is because of death that we tolerate evil. All meet death in the end, and because of death we make allowance for evil though we do not like it."

"It was his belief that a witty answer turneth away wrath and that the oil of reason should always be poured on troubled waters."

"Tie a man's hands behind his back and then ask him if he's going to chop down a tree."

"One might go so far as to say that it is strong, dominating personalities who might play a decisive role when things are changing. Somehow they always manage to speak with the voice of authority, and their innate strength of character drives them to take the lead in almost any situation. Allied to all this is their boundless optimism and faith in their fellow men."

"You find yourself throwing blows but weeping at the same time, because of all the people who sit and wail in the darkness, and because of all the fat smug persecutors to whom this wailing is like sweet music, and some inner voice keeps on telling you that your way is right for you, that the process of rising up from the darkness is an intensely personal and private one, and that if you can find a society that leaves the individual to develop freely you ought to choose that society as your home."

"Most men want to achieve great victories ... But I am only looking for a woman."

"There seemed to be ancient, ancestral lines drawn around the African man which defined his loyalties, responsibilities, and even the duration of his smile."

"Things wouldn’t have been so bad if black men as a whole had not accepted their oppression and added to it with their own taboos and traditions."

"Prostitutes, he was to decide, were the best type of women you'd find among all black women, unless a man wanted to be trapped for life by a dead thing. A prostitute laughed. She established her own kind of equality with men. She picked up a wide, vicarious experience that made her charter in a lively way, and she was so used to the sex organs of men that she was inclined to regard him as a bit more than a sex organ. Not so the dead thing most men married. Someone told that dead thing that a man was only his sex organs and functioned as such. Someone told her that she was inferior in every way to a man, and she had been inferior for so long that even if a door opened somewhere, she could not wear this freedom gracefully. There was no balance between herself and a man. There was nothing but this quiet, contemptuous, know-all silence between herself, the man and his functioning organs. And everyone called this married life, even the filthy unwashed children, the filthy unwashed floors, and piles of unwashed dishes."

"I don't know these people but my search for a faith has taught me that life is a fire in which each burns until it is time to close the shop."

"People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. ... It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion a like that."

"He had grown up in an atmosphere where the most important thing in the world was the stronger whose shadow darkened the doorstep. People were the central part of the universe of Africa, and the world stood still because of this."

"Poor people are poor because they don't know how to get rich."

"Dinorego was saying, ‘We can progress too, even though we are uneducated men. The mind of an uneducated man works like this: he is a listener and a believer. Most of all he is a believer.’"

"There was always something on this earth man was forced to love and worship by reason of its absence. People in cloudy, misty climates worshiped the sun, and people in semi-desert countries worshipped the rain."

"Most men were waiting for the politicians to sort out their private agonies."

"Being an African man he ought to have known that nothing happened on the continent of Africa without all Africans getting to know of it."

"Even the trees were dying, from roots upwards,' he said. 'Does everything die like this?' 'No,' she said. 'You may see no rivers on the ground but we keep the rivers inside us. That is why all good things and all good people are called rain. Sometimes we see the rain clouds gather even though not a cloud appears in the sky. It is all in our heart.'"

"No words, however wise, could explain the awfulness of the death, not while the living were firmly attached to love, child-bearing, child-rearing, hunger, struggle, and the sunrise of tomorrow. Life had to flow all the time, for the living, like water in a stream."

"If you said no, no, no, and kept your claws in a people's heart, what else did you want but that they should all die?"

"Was he crying now because, for the first time in his life, he was feeling what it must be like to face a tomorrow without any future?"

"Sometimes a man's God was like Solomon and he decked himself up in gold and he built a house that was a hundred cubits in length and fifty cubits in breadth and thirty cubits in height. Gold candlesticks, cherubims, and pomegranates adorned his house, which had forty bathrooms. And there are bowls and snuffers and spoons and censers and door hinges of pure gold. And all that the followers of Solomon could do was to gape and marvel and chronicle these wonders in minute detail. Even Solomon's wisdom took secondary place to his material possessions and dazzling raiment. Then came a God who was greater than Solomon, but he walked around with no shoes, in rough cloth, wandering up and down the dusty footpath in the hot sun, with no bed on which to rest his head. And all that the followers of this God could do was to chronicle, in minute detail, the wonder and marvel of his wisdom."

"Therefore the Good God cast one last look at Makhaya, whom he intended revenging almightily for his silent threat to knock him down. He would so much entangle this stupid young man with marriage and babies and children that he would always have to think, not twice but several hundred times, before he came to knocking anyone down."

"Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook it was there."

"You just have to look different ... then seemingly anything can be said and done to you as your outer appearance reduces you to the status of a non-human being."

"The rhythm of sunrise, the rhythm of sunset, filled her life."

"...a door silently opened on the small, dark airless room in which their souls had been shut for a long time. The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room."

"He was a thin little fellow with a hollowed-out chest and comic knobbly knees."

"Perhaps they want me to send a message to the children,’ he thought tenderly, noting that the clouds were drifting in the direction of his home some hundred miles away. But before he could frame the message, the warder in charge of his work span shouted:‘Hey, what you tink you’re doing, Brille?’"

"The prisoner swung round, blinking rapidly, yet at the same time sizing up the enemy. He was a new warder, named Jacobus Stephanus Hannetjie. His eyes were the color of the sky but they were frightening. A simple, primitive, brutal soul gazed out of them."

"They were grouped together for convenience, as it was one of the prison regulations that no black warder should be in charge of a political prisoner lest this prisoner convert him to his views. It never seemed to occur to the authorities that this very reasoning was the strength of Span One and a clue to the strange terror they aroused in the warders."

"Be good comrades, my children. Cooperate, then life will run smoothly."

"Hannetjie is just a child and stupidly truthful."

"The man really [is] a child."

"Scarcely a breath of wind disturbed the stillness of the day, and the long rows of cabbages were bright green in the sunlight. Large white clouds drifted slowly across the deep blue sky. Now and then they obscured the sun and caused a chill on the backs of the prisoners who had to work all day long in the cabbage field.This trick the clouds were playing with the sun eventually caused one of the prisoners who wore glasses to stop work, straighten up and peer shortsightedly at them. He was a thin little fellow with a hollowed-out chest and comic knobbly knees. He also had a lot of fanciful ideas because he smiled at the clouds."

"Up until the arrival of Warder Hannetjie, no warder had dared beat any member of Span One and no warder had lasted more than a week with them. The battle was entirely psychological. Span One was assertive and it was beyond the scope of white warders to handle assertive black men. Thus, Span One had got out of control. They were the best thieves and liars in the camp. They chatted and smoked tobacco. And since they moved, thought and acted as one, they had perfected every technique of group concealment."

"he said, “I don’t take orders from a kaffir. I don’t know what kind of kaffir you tink you are. Why don’t you say Baas. I’m your Baas. Why don’t you say Baas, hey?” Brille blinked his eyes rapidly but by contrast his voice was strangely calm.“I’m twenty years older than you,” he said. It was the first thing that came to mind, but the comrades seemed to think it a huge joke. A titter swept up the line. The next thing Warder Hannetjie whipped out a knobkerrie and gave Brille several blows about the head."

"You know, comrades,” he said, “I’ve got Hannetjie. I’ll betray him tomorrow.”"

"It was in Botswana where, mentally, the normal and the abnormal blended completely in Elizabeth’s mind.”"

"Be the same as others in heart; just be a person.”"

"It is when you cry, in the blackest hour of despair, that you stumble on a source of goodness.”"

"When someone says 'my people' with a specific stress on the blackness of those people, they are after kingdoms and permanently child-like slaves. 'The people' are never going to rise above the status of 'the people'. They are going to be told what is good for them by the 'mother' and the 'father'."

"'Life is such a gentle, treasured thing. I learn about it every minute. I think about it so deeply.'"

"When people stumble upon magic they study it very closely, because all living people are, at heart, amateur scientists and inventors. Why must racialists make an exemption of the black man? Why must she come here and help the black man with a special approach: ha, ha, ha, you're never going to come up to our level of civilisation?"

"The victim is really the most flexible, the most free person on earth. He doesn't have to think up endless laws and endless falsehoods. His jailer does that. His jailer creates the chains and the oppression. He is merely presented with it. He is presented with a thousand and one hells to live through, and he usually lives through them all."

"Who is the greater man - the man who cries, broken by anguish, or his scoffing, mocking, jeering oppressor?"

"'God isn't a magical formula for me,' ... 'God isn't a switched-on, mysterious, unknown current. I can turn to and, by doing so, feel secure in my own nobility."

"Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk."

"The year ended in a roar of pain."

"You don't realize the point at which you become evil."

"The loud, pounding rhythm of his drama drummed in her ears day and night."

"I did a lot of reading on my own because I loved that particular world. You open up a book and you learn about something that's much more exciting than your everyday grind, a world of magic beyond your own. And I feel that the beginnings of writing really start whereby you know that when you open a book there's a magical world there."

"I think that my whole life has been shaped by my South African experience and I would never really fall into the category of a writer who produces light entertainment for people. My whole force and direction comes from having something to say. What we are mainly very bothered about has been the dehumanizing of black people. And if we can resolve these situations-and I work both within the present and the future-if we can resolve our difficulties it is because we want a future which is defined for our children. So then you can't sort of say that you have ended any specific thing or that you have changed the world. You have merely offered your view of a grander world, of a world that's much grander than the one we've had already."

"when there is a tragedy, detail and a picture of the country emerges because people discuss it so much."

"You could really say that my writing experience began in Botswana. Everything about the society was magical to me and the reason I began writing is that I wanted to communicate that fascination I felt for the ways of life of the people of this country. It is almost impossible for a writer to evoke a similar feeling of magic and wonder about South Africa. It's too despairing."

"In my novel, A Question of Power, I was extremely bothered to define evil. I was looking for answers all along to questions of exploitation. And I was looking for balances; that is, if we have to live with good and evil we ought to present them as they really are."

"I was born on the sixty of July, 1937, in the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital, in South Africa. The reason for my peculiar birthplaces was that my mother was white, and she had acquired me from a black man. She was judged insane, and committed to the mental hospital while pregnant. Her name was Bessie Emery and I consider it the only honor South African officials ever did me—naming me after this unknown, lovely, and unpredictable woman.""

"I have always been just me, with no frame of reference to anything beyond myself.""

"Whatever my manifold disorders are, I hope to get them sorted out pretty soon, because I've just got to tell a story.""

"In a cold and loveless country like South Africa his warmth of heart and genuine friendliness is like a great roaring fire on the white icy wastes of the Antarctic."

"TELL THEM HOW NATURAL, SENSIBLE, NORMAL IS HUMAN KINDNESS. TELL THEM, THOSE WHO JUDGE MY COUNTRY, AFRICA, BY GAIN AND GREED, THAT THE GODS WALK ABOUT HER BAREFOOT WITH NO ERMINE AND GOLD-STUDDED CLOAKS"

"I feel in my heart that our Pharaoh has already been born. It may be that I shall not live to see Pharaoh's day but I want all those who now live in anguish to be comforted. For one day, due to the length of his roots and the depth of his wisdom, all nations shall dwell under his shadow."

"You have a beautiful soul that was nurtured on a dung heap."

"I was thinking a while ago, Johnny, that half the trouble in the world is caused by the difficulty we have in communicating with each other. It's practically impossible to say what you really mean and to be sure that the other person is understanding you. Word communication is dependent on reason and logic but there are many things in life that are not reasonable or logical. A jazz musician can say something to me in his music but it would be quite beyond me to translate into words what he is communicating through music. What he has to say touches the most vital part of my life but I can only acknowledge his message silently."

"Do you think life will care about you if you do not show that you care about it?"

"They pursued their love with a wild abandon, unprotected against the treachery of the insecure foundation on which it was based and too young to bridge the gap that would suddenly and unexpectedly fling them miles apart."

"People don't fall in love these days. The movies have made that kind of thing stale. They have robbed us of our capacity to feel through feeding us with cheap sensation. Ask any man and he will tell you that he can't kiss his wife because she wants him to kiss her the way Richard Widmark kisses."

"The whole principle of living and learning is dependent on what is going on in the mind. The mind is like a huge, living tapestry. Everything we see, hear, learn and experience gets being imprinted on it. As we grow we begin to see that we can correlate those impressions into a definite pattern and so we call that our life."

"Life's one hell of a joke. It dresses us up with insatiable yearnings and high-flying ambitions and then flings the fact of our insignificance in our faces. Half of us fall for the joke and start the mad rush after the big prizes. Some, like you and me can't fall for the joke. We've been hit too hard at too early an age."

"Above all the necessities of life, human beings need love and it is often the one thing most denied to them."

"You are young and might prefer to believe that love is moonlight and rosy sunsets. It is not. It is brutal, violent, ugly, possessive and dictatorial. It makes no allowances for the freedom and individuality of the loved one. Lovers become one closely knit unit in thought and feeling. Should you eventually find that this love is beyond your capacity or that you cannot rise to its demands, you may leave but please make sure that you go to some place where I will never be able to find you."

"Once a man involves himself with women there's always some kind of retribution. They're the most vengeful creatures on this earth."

"There's only one way to make yourself shock-proof. Do not be impressed by evil and do not be impressed by good."

"The task of the writer is to serve humanity and not party politicians and their temporary fixations. But it's a hard path to follow. I'm having headaches over it because I'm too intensely aware of the pressures and issues and yet at the same time wish to retain my right to think for myself."

"She was hardly conscious of her agonised cry as his hard kisses ravaged her mouth. For her it was like a dissolution of body and bones; with only a heart left; a pulsing heart awash in an ocean of rushing tornadic darkness; helpless at its own forward rushing..."

"Life is not in bits and pieces. It is a magnificent, rhythmic, pulsating symphony."

"Life is a treacherous quicksand with no guarantee of safety anywhere. We can only try to grab what happiness we can before we are swept off into oblivion."

"Not now, not ever, shall I be complete; and though the road to find you has been desolate with loneliness, still more desolate is the road that leads away from you. It is as though pain piles on pain in an endless, unbroken stream, until it is the only reality. What do they do, those who love?"

"The only reason why I always admit pain is that it seems the only constructive emotion."

"A basically timid and cowardly person dare not presume to speak for others. He can only speak for himself. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"There were once highway robbers, who said: 'Your money or your life!' Today, they say: 'Your politics or your life!' [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"Who am I? What am I? In past and present, the answer lies in Africa; in part it lies within the whole timeless, limitless, eternal universe. How can I discover the meaning and purpose of my country if I do not first discover the meaning and purpose of my own life? Today there are a thousand labels. One of them is 'crazy crank'. I do not mind being a 'crazy crank', as long as I am sure that I am a crank of my own making, as long as I resist environmental, societal, and political attempts to control and suppress my mind. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"All life flows continuously like water in the stream and I am only some of the water in the stream, never able to gauge my depth. The hours, the years, the eternities slip by too quickly, moving, changing, never the same thing. I move with this current to the ocean only to be flung back again to the stream. The cycle seems unending, repetitive. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"The holy order of doing the right thing is incompatible with love, which does all the wrong things. Love can never learn to choose the woman who has the highest price, or whose father possesses the greatest number of cattle. Love strikes the outcast, the beggar, the stranger, and leaves the dull, dead, complacent conformer to his safety. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"The body is a positive thing, and love without a body is negative, useless, purposeless. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"A woman is a maker of pottery, feeling life with her hands, keeping it whole, moulding it from the depths upwards. Her vision is constant, unchanging. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

""The philosophy of love and peace strangely overlooked who was in possession of the guns…The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. It seemed to Makhaya far preferable for Africa if it did without Christianity and Christian double-talk, fat priests, golden images, and looked around at all the thin naked old men who sat under trees weaving baskets with shaking hands. People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that.”"

"MakhayaMaseko’s quest is to find inner peace of mind by a constructive engagement with the social world and in the world of GolemaMmidi, these desires are offered fulfilment"

"“It’s Zulu … I am a Zulu. And he laughed sarcastically at the thought of calling himself a Zulu"

"“the poverty and tribalism of Africa [are] a blessing if people [can] develop, sharing everythingwith each other"

"…the Tswana language [like] the bush, [belongs] to all Batswana people"

"Head’s contention is that socially ascribed identities arefalse, misleading and degrading to the true inner person"

"“they cannot exist unless they can live in the village insuch a way that the changes that they bring about are necessary … in determining who they are"

"it would seem to suggest that Africanness is not a natural state of existence, [but that] it must be performed"

"I think there's something very special about women writers, black women writers in America and those that I know of in any real sense in Africa-Bessie Head, for example, in Africa or Gloria Naylor here. There's a gaze that women writers seem to have that is quite fascinating to me because they tend not to be interested in confrontations with white men-the confrontation between black women and white men is not very important, it doesn't center the text. There are more important ones for them and their look, their gaze of the text is unblinking and wide and very steady. It's not narrow, it's very probing and it does not flinch. And it doesn't have these funny little axes to grind. There's something really marvelous about that."

"I asked Bessie Head why a writer of such renown as she chose to remain in an isolated village, with no telephone, few modern conveniences, remote from the culture of cities. She told me Serowe suited her literary themes. She came from a humble background, she said, and preferred ordinary people. Powerful people, she went on, tended to be domineering; they don't pay their bills. The village people, she said, pay their bills "meticulously." "I have the courtesies, and love, of the people," she said. "What other life can I live?""

"Bessie Head: I found her novels very, very gripping, fascinating, challenging, really intellectually intriguing."

"“I once sat down on a bench at Cape Town railway station where the notice "Whites Only" was obscured. A few moments later a white man approached and shouted: 'Get off!' It never occurred to him that he was achieving the opposite of his dreams of superiority and had become a living object of contempt, that human beings, when they are human, dare not conduct themselves in such ways.”"

"“It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.”"

"“The whole village was involved. There was no longer buzz, buzz, buzz. Something they liked as Africans to pretend themselves incapable of-- being oppressive and prejudiced-- was being exposed. They always knew it was there but no oppressor believes in his oppression.”"

"“A discipline I have observed is an attitude of love and reverence to people.”"

"“And if the white man thought that Asians were a low, filthy nation, Asians could still smile with relief – at least, they were not Africans. And if the white man thought Africans were a low, filthy nation, Africans in Southern Africa could still smile – at least, they were not Bushmen.”"

"“Love is mutually feeding each other, not one living on another like a ghoul.”"

"“…This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that.”"

"I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.”"

"“Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.”"

"“Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook, it was there. The white man found only too many people who looked different. That was all that outraged the receivers of his discrimination, that he applied the technique of the wild jiggling dance and the rattling tin cans to anyone who was not a white man.”"

"“When no one wanted to bury a dead body, they called the missionaries; not that the missionaries really liked to be involved with mankind, but that they had been known to go into queer places because of their occupation. They would do that but they did not often like you to walk into their yard. They preferred to talk to you outside the fence.”"

"“There was something Dikeledi called sham. It made people believe they were more important than the normal image of humankind. She had grown up surrounded by sham.”"

"“At such times he would think, "What will I do if she does not love me as much as I love her?" A terrible reply came from his heart, 'Kill her.”"

"“The man who slowly walked away from them was a king in their society. A day had come when he had decided that he did not need any kingship other than the kind of wife everybody would loathe from the bottom of their hearts.”"

"“The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. It seemed to Makhaya far preferable for Africa if it did without Christianity and Christian double-talk, fat priests, golden images, and looked around at all the thin naked old men who sat under trees weaving baskets with shaking hands. People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that. 135”"

"“That is, adoration was patient and waiting while love or, if you liked, plain sexual passion banged everything about. It either shouted or thought it knew too much, and it had always left him cold and had not involved his heart. Therefore, if he wanted to get involved now it would be on his own terms and at his own pace.”"

"“Dikeledi could make no secret of the fact that, in relation to men, she often suffered from high blood pressure, except that the trouble with the bloodstream had eventually boiled down to one, unattainable man.”"

"once you make yourself a freak and special any bastard starts to use you. That's half of the fierce fight in Africa'"

"“Maybe he concentrated on his immediate situation. It was African. It was horrible. But wherever mankind had gathered itself into a social order, the same things were happening. There was a mass of people with no humnaity to whom another mass referred: Why, they are naturally like that. They like to live in such filth. They have been doing it for centuries”"

"“The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room. As they breathed in the fresh, clear air their humanity awakened. They examined their condition. There was the foetid air, the excreta and the horror of being an oddity of the human race, with half the head of a man and half the body of a donkey. They laughed in an embarrassed way, scratching their heads. How had they fallen into this condition when, indeed, they were as human as everyone else? They started to run out into the sunlight, then they turned and looked at the dark, small room. They said: "We are not going back there.”"

"Let me tell you for nothing it was a great relief to find all my toes in the right order and with the right amount of skin and bone. You miss them fierce when you don’t have them."

"I had just sat on the edge of the river with my knees right up against my chest and cried because ten is too young to know that sometimes your parents have to do what’s best for you even if it hurts you. Even if it hurts them."

"I breathed in the smoke from my final cigarette. It tasted like acceptance of growing up."

"The Worme Bridge’ stood out for us with its brave story and clear, distinctive voice; it’s a wonderfully dark exploration of the water theme. The story works effortlessly to construct an other kind of reality while grounding itself in the real world. The writing is compelling: the reader is drawn into this family and the strangeness that overtakes them. We found this a powerful piece of writing that continues to haunt the reader afterwards."

"My whole life has felt like a long deeply unsatisfying love affair with my mother. She is the beloved who doesn't love back."

"I wanted my writing to offer an account of what it was like to take care of my mother, the details of that experience, the feelings, the lived experience. Women often do work like this that is unacknowledged, unseen. So, I guess I wanted to make it visible – not just my work, but this kind of work of taking care of elderly parents, of a child."

"Human is human. We’re blood, bone, emotion, piss, shit, love. Skin colour shouldn’t be what trips you up as a writer – it’s just skin after all, it’s our experiences while we’re here that are important, and all human beings, regardless of race, are equipped with the capacity for empathy and understanding."

"First rule of writing is to read everything you can get your hands on to fill your head with ideas. And then, once you have your story down, let it rest. Then revise, revise, revise."

"We used to believe that the highway went somewhere, that over the horizon was escape, places we'd never been and thought we wanted to go."

"Joe Saviour once told me that every life has a legend. Before the soul comes down to earth, God seals a story inside it. To know your purpose, you need to unravel the mystery of that legend."

"Shame-shame, Thuli's shame, all the same, shame-shame."

"Sizane, you gave your girls the wrong names. Thulisile means 'quiet one' but she talks, talks, talks..."

"I do like this idea of time. For me there is no before or after. It’s all during. It’s just a bunch of “durings.” I don’t think of myself as someone in the past, I’m a person going through something. I do like to see how these “durings” influence the future."

"Koko and I somehow had the ability to walk alongside our hurt and disappointment; we never let it get ahead of us or lead us astray.’"

"How could he possibly describe anything when the world around him had lost its colour"

"I birthed myself; it was bloody and painful but now I’m standing on the roof of a city as something new."

"The city is like that: it loves new and shiny things; which also leads it to be a graveyard of previously beautiful relics."

"Things that lurk in the shadows do not like the light. People get used to one tiny light and begin to seek out more of it in the world and in themselves – that’s how the light liberates us."

"Being liked is not nearly as great as being happy with the decisions I make. I'm not money, so I know not everyone likes me"

"It’s fantasy when white people write it. When black and brown people write it, it’s magic realism"

"It seems as if the whole country is falling apart, so why be a good person, why be good to yourself, when the country is not being good to you, it’s not giving you the opportunities you need"

"It’s always the youth that are making the sacrifices. When I think about the Soweto riots in 1976 in South Africa, it wasn’t people that stopped working and said, we are going to fight against these policies, it was the school children"

"I write for myself and then I edit for the reader, to make things easier for them, to refine the ideas"

"I try as a reader to put myself in places I’ve never been to, in the shoes of people I would never meet"

"I don’t think all women need to birth themselves"

"I definitely feel the world lacks a sense of humour"

"The twentieth century had actors and actresses. They didn’t rely on acting algorithms or fantasize about digital actors. For all its cruelty, I find the old world sympathetic for that reason alone."

"In Abacha Reef Home, you were kept as safe as humanly possible—assuming it is safe to be bored out of your wits."

"“The real question you should be asking is quite different: Why is Section able to function at a time when the larger Agency is paralyzed?” I said, “I don’t like riddles. Why is it?” “Because, for centuries, Section has kept its files on paper, not inside a machine. Muller couldn’t wipe them out…. “We’ve learnt that you cannot control information once it’s in electronic form. You can trust a key; you can trust a lock because it has a defined physical location. It can be made in such a way that it is difficult to duplicate. Numbers, no matter how difficult they are to guess, can be copied perfectly. We use physical objects.”"

"Controlling the leakage of information is always the key to success in counterintelligence."

"I wondered how he could be so trusting of the universe to lie asleep in the middle of it."

"I prayed that, for once, the predictions of the brassheads would turn out to be as hollow as the ravings of forgotten saints and prophets, medicine men and bone throwers. Everybody wanted to know the future but it made us miserable when we did."

"“I want to find out who is supplying items to a government agency. Is there an easy way to find out?” The librarian folded his handkerchief into a square on his palm before he answered. “This is Brazil. There is no easy way to find out anything.”"

"The power of prime numbers: the key to the new world and the solution to the mysteries of the infinite."

"The Mother Superior came forward and put her hand out to me. She was as tall as me, her stony-green eyes highly dilated. No doubt she was under the influence of one or another compound meant to enhance the quest for divinity and ready the soul to make a reckoning. The religious orders were legendary for their chemical dependencies."

"A strange group of people, these, he thought. Nothing tied them down. They seem to believe in nothing. But well, they had given him a bed. She had given it to him. She who was the strangest of them all."

"An unbelievable thing happened. The second colored man knocked the first one down and ran down the street waving to Xuma."

"Leah left him and he collapsed in a heap. She looked down and spat. The she raised her heel and brought it down on his face."

"I am no good and I cannot help myself. It will be right if you hate me. You should beat me. But inside me there is something wrong. And it is because I want the things of the white people. I want to be like the white people and go where they go and do the things they do and I am black. I cannot help it."

"Out of your feeling and out of your pain it must come. Others have found it. You can too. But first you must think and not be afraid of your thoughts. And if you have questions and you look around you will find those who will answer them. But first you must know what you are going to fight and why and what you want."

"Hoopvlei was another of the white man's ventures to get the natives and coloreds out of the towns. The natives did not like the locations, and besides, they were all full, so the white man had started townships in the outlying district of Johannesburg in the hope of killing Vrededorp and Malay Camp. Many other places had been killed thus."

"No! I don't want you to touch me."

"He did not want to go there for fear he should meet Eliza. And she was like a devil in his blood. He could not forget her."

"He sat on the bed and held his head in his hands. Eliza had gone out with that sickly monkey dressed in the clothes of a white man. Why, even his hands were soft."

"Johannes drunk and Johannes sober were two different people."

"The only place where he was completely free was underground in the mines. There he was a master and knew his way. There he did not even fear his white man, for his white man depended on him. He was the boss boy. He gave the orders to the other mine boys. They would do for him what they would not do for his white man or any other white man."

"His white man had even tried to make friends with him because the other mine boys respected him so much. But a white man and a black man cannot be friends. They work together. That's all."

"He's just a mine boy ... Yes. Grand, but not a human being yet. Just a mine boy."

"A man's a man to the extent that he asserts himself. There's no assertion in your mine boy. There is confusion and bewilderment and acceptance. Nothing more."

"So many people who consider themselves progressives have their own weird notions about the native, but they all have one thing in common. They want to decide who the good native is and they want to do good things for him. [...] They want to think for him and he must accept their thoughts. And they like him to depend on them."

"It is not enough to destroy, you must build as well. Build up a stock of faith in your breast in native Zuma, mine boy, who has no social conscience, who cannot read or write and cannot understand his wanting what you want. **Page 69."

"The natives did not like locations, and besides, they were all full, so the white man had started townships in the outlying district of Johannesburg in the hope of killing Vrededorp and Malay Camp."

"If a man loves a woman he loves her. That is all. There is no bad and there is no good. There is only love. The only thing that is bad is if a man loves a woman and she loves him not."

"A woman finds a man and the whole world is a new place. And the fighting stiffness that was ever in her body, goes. And the hardness of her head stops and she does not think any more with her head but feels with her heart. Yes, it is ever so. And with a man it is so too. His shoulders square and a smile is not far from his lips and there is a new certainty in him. Yes. It has ever been so and it will ever be so when a man and a woman love. **Page 123"

"If a woman loves a man she does that which is good for him."

"I pushed my nose and lip...I was inside the raindrop away from the misery of the cold damp room. I was in a place of warmth and sunshine, inside my raindrop world."

"I remember the many people who suddenly invaded the house, making me feel stranger in my own home...With his (father’s) going, the order and stability that had been in my life dissolved. There was no breadwinner. So we had to leave the place that had been our home."

"You are Colored. There are three kinds of people: white people, Colored people, and black people. The white people come first, then the Colored people, then the black people. Lee asks “Why?” but Aunt’s answer is, “Because it is so."

"Twenty-second Street, the street where we lived, was strange and alien. The noise was frightening after the quiet of Elsburg."

"It seemed to me there was no sense in life. Things happened and no one seemed to know why."

"All the years of his life had been spent walking through the land; from east to west, then back; from north to south, then back."

"Dressed in an orange sack. Three holes in the sack allowed for his head and arms to come through. About his waist was a piece of rope that gathered the sack in and made it hang like some monkish garb. He was barefooted."

"It was difficult for the Africans most of whom had taken European education and embraced Christian religion, to revert to the rapidly dying, outdated traditions and customs of their forefathers"

"Dear God! Has earth a fairer land? Can there be one as fair? And if there can, can I feel for it as for this? And can my heart ever ache for the people of another with the purity it does for the people of this? The whites here sing a love song to the land, from within. Would they have me sing it from without? A little self-conscious and ashamed at the intensity of my emotions. New feelings, elusive and uncontrollable, played on my heart and mind. A need different from all the other needs I had ever known moved me to longing. And I did not know what I longed for."

"Light is white: dark is black."

"Really these streets and trees, almost the clean air I breathed here were: RESERVED FOR EUROPEANS ONLY. I was the intruder. And like the intruder, I walked carefully lest I be discovered. I longed for what the white folk had. I envied them their superior European lot"

"In that time I had been accused of theft, I had been called all the pet names of abuse reserved by whites for blacks; I had carried heavy loads to the tram stop, and women had conveniently forgotten to pay."

"I turned and looked at the city. A sea of twinkling, multi-colored lights leaped to the eye. They threw up the outlines of buildings. They made the wide streets shine. They spelled out advertisements. I could map the city by its lights."

"That was the heart of it there, where it was almost as light as day. I could see cars and trams clearly. And the outlines of people moving. White people. To the left, and a little towards me, was Malay Camp, an inky black spot in the sea of light. Couldn't see anything there. Dark folk move in darkness: white folk move in light. Well, Malay Camp wouldn’t be a slum if it were as light as the city. Slum is darkness. Dark folk live in darkness."

"Oh––isn’t it lovely? That’s the one I want when we are rich!’ Her eyes were bright, her lips parted"

"In the name of civilization, the dignity and worth of the African people has been grossly underrated, their progress retarded and aspirations frustrated, and the whole life undermined. They are compelled to live in appalling conditions of squalor, filth and isolation..."

"You write in English and already you are touching things that should not be mentioned."

"Who had given him the scholarship? The Bantu Welfare Trust? No one I asked seemed sure. I put out feelers. The Welfare Trust was only for pure-blooded Africans. And though the Africans might accept me as one of themselves, the whites who administered the trust would not. Those to whom I spoke thought it crazy, but there you are."

"The concerts and theatres, the libraries and the parks, the bookshops and the clean, fresh looking tearooms, the buses and departmental stores."

"On a different mental and emotional level my friend Jonathan had gone through the same process. Christianity and the knowledge it brought had made the tribal past inadequate. So he had turned to the Christian present and future. These working men had found the tribal economy inadequate when the new taxes, the new offerings, and new prices of the white men came. So they had turned to city..."

"Found that the good things of this present are RESERVED FOR EUROPEANS ONLY"

"Entering is stepping into a new Dark Age. The sea had once been here. In its retreat it had left a white, unyielding sand, grown dirty with time. It had left almost a desert."

"He (Roderiques) was hungry and homeless. So I fed him. He told me something had gone wrong and he had to leave the Roman school. He said he had no people."

"She's vain about her hair."

"It's because I creep up on people, I creep up on them while their backs are turned. Then suddenly without knowing how they realise, I'm there and they want what's there. Only they can't have it."

"For all agonies of the joints: Lum¬ bago, rheumatism, tennis elbows, housemaid’s knees;also ideal for bunions, corns, callouses"

"Too many cooks spoil the broth"

"No smell doth stink as sweet as labour, Tis joyous times when man and man Do work and sweat in common toil.When all the world’s my neighbor."

"Ethel Lange, 10 de Villiers Street, Oudtshoom. I am eighteen years old and well-developed and would like to correspond with a gent of sober habits and a good outlook on life. My interests are nature, rock-and-roll, swimming and a happy future. My motto is, ‘rolling stones gather no moss.’ Please note: I promise to reply faithfully"

"Twenty-two and no strings attached. Would like letters from men of the same age or older. My \interests are beauty contests and going out. A snap with the first letter, please."

"Betty Jones. Roodepoort. Young and pleasing personality. I’d like to correspond with gentlemen friends of maturity. No teenagers need reply. My hobby at the moment is histori¬ cal films, but I’m prepared to go back to last year’s, which was autograph hunting. I would appreciate a photo¬ graph"

"I’m sure you’d like to know I got your letter, and the picture. I’d say Oudtshoom seems okay. You were quite okay too. I would like to send you a picture of me, but it’s this way. It’s winter down here. The light is bad, the lake is black, the birds have gone. Wait for spring, when things improve. Okay? Good. I heard you ask about my car. Yes. I have it. We pumped the tires today. Tomorrow I think I’ll put in some gas. I’d like to take you for a drive, Ethel, and Lucy too. In fact. I’d like to drive both of you. They say over here. I’m fast. Ethel I’ll tell you this. If I could drive you, Ethel, I would do it so fast, Ethel, and Lucy too, both of you, so fast I would, do it so fast, fast, fast it would hurt—"

"I notice your brother got boots. All policemen got boots. Good luck to him, any¬ way, and Lucy too. Write soon. Zachariah Pietersen"

"I like the thought of this little white girl"

"I took a good look at my life. What did I see? A bloody circus monkey! Selling most of his time on earth to another man. Out of every twenty-four hours I could only properly call mine the six when I was sleeping. What the hell is the use of that?"

"This is a strong-room of dreams. The dreamers? My people. The simple people, who you never find mentioned in the history books, who never get statutes erected to them, or monuments commemorating their great deeds. People who would be forgotten, and their dreams with them, if it wasn’t for Styles. That’s what I do, friends. Put down, in my way, on paper the dreams and hopes of my people so that even their children’s children will remember a man."

"Burn that book? Stop kidding yourself, Sizwe! Anyway, suppose you do. You must immediately go apply for a new one. Right? And until that new one comes, be careful the police don’t stop you and ask for your book. Into the Courtroom, brother. Charge: Failing to produce Reference Book on demand. Five rand or five days."

"You must understand this. We own nothing except ourselves. This world and its laws, allows us nothing except ourselves."

"Sizwe Bansi, in a manner of speaking, is dead!"

"I don't want to die."

"What's wrong with me? I'm a man. I've got eyes to see. I've got ears to listen when people talk. I've got a good head to think things. What's wrong with me?"

"I don't want to lose my name, Buntu."

"Are you really worried about your children, friend, or are you just worried about yourself and your bloody name? Wake up, man! Use that bloody book and with your pay on Friday you'll have a real chance to do something for them."

"Hold it, Robert. Hold it just like that. Just one more. Now smile Robert... Smile... Smile..."

"Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again."

"Yes! That's what all our talk about a decent world has been... just so much bullshit.""We did say it was still only a dream.""And a bloody useless one at that. Life's a fuck-up and it's never going to change."

"It's just that life felt the right size in there... not too big and not too small. Wasn't so hard to work up a bit of courage. It's got so bloody complicated since then."

"Sam: There's no collisions out there, Hally. Nobody trips or stumbles or bumps into anybody else. That's what that moment is all about. To be one of those finalists on that dance floor is like... like being in a dream about a world in which accidents don't happen. Hally: Jesus, Sam! That's beautiful! Willie: [Can endure waiting no longer.] I'm starting! [Willie dances while Sam talks.] Sam: Of course it is. That's what I've been trying to say to you all afternoon. And it's beautiful because that is what we want life to be like. But instead, like you said, Hally, we're bumping into each other all the time. Look at the three of us this afternoon. I've bumped into Willie, the two of us have bumped into you, you've bumped into your mother, she bumping into your Dad... None of us knows the steps and there's no music playing. And it doesn't stop with us. The whole world is doing it all the time. Open a newspaper and what do you read? America has bumped into Russia, England is bumping into India, rich man bumps into poor man. Those are big collisions, Hally. They make for a lot of bruises. People get hurt in all that bumping, and we're sick and tired of it now. It's been going on for too long. Are we never going to get it right? ... Learn to dance life like champions instead of always being just a bunch of beginners at it? Hally: You've got a vision, Sam! Sam: Not just me. What I'm saying to you is that everybody's got it. That's why there's only standing room left for the Centenery Hall in two weeks' time. For as long as the music lasts, we are going to see six couples get it right, the way we want life to be. Hally: But is that the best we can do, Sam watch six finalists dreaming about the way it should be? Sam: I don't know. But it starts with that. Without the dream we won't know what we're going for. And anyway I reckon there are a few people who have got past just dreaming about it and are trying for something real."

"Be careful, Hally." "Of what? The truth? I seem to be the only one around here who is prepared to face it."

"Life is just a plain bloody mess, that's all. And people are fools."

"Sam: So then what is art? Hally: You want a definition? Sam: Ja. Hally: [He realizes he has got to be careful. He gives the matter a lot of thought before answering.] Philosophers have been trying to do that for centuries. What is Art? What is Life? But basically I suppose it's... the giving of meaning to matter. Sam: Nothing to do with beautiful? Hally: It goes beyond that. It's the giving of form to the formless."

"Bullshit, as usual."

"Flicker of morbid interest."

"But things will change, you wait and see."

"I'm all right on oppression."

"Tolstoy may have educated his peasants, but I've educated you."

"Sam, Willie ... is he in there with you boys?"

"In fact, I was shit-scared that we were going to make fools of ourselves."

"Little white boy ... and a black man old enough to be his father flying a kite."

"You want to get into the story as well, do you?"

"It was you who start me ballroom dancing."

"Not just me. What I'm saying to you is that everybody's got it."

"He certainly was trying to teach people to get the steps right."

"All you've got to do is stand up and walk away from it."

""It doesn't have to be that way. There something called progress, you know. We don't exactly burn people at the stake anymore."

"We need a definition of greatness, and I suppose that would be somebody who... somebody who benefited all mankind.""

"It's the likes of you that kept the Inquisition in business. It's called bigotry.""

"I think I spent more time in there with you chaps than anywhere else in that dump. And do you blame me? Nothing but bloody misery wherever you went.""

"To be one of those finalists on that floor is like... like being in a dream world in which accidents don't happen.""

"He's a white man and that's good enough for you."

"I mean, how do I wash off yours and your father's filth?...I've also failed. A long time ago I promised myself I would do something, but you've just shown me...Master Harold...that I've failed."

"Fly another kite, I suppose. It worked once, and this time I need it as much as you do.""

"Tonight I find Hilda and say sorry. And make promise I won't beat her no more. You hear me, Boet Sam?"

"Sam: But don’t let me see it. The secret is to make it look easy. Ballroom must look happy, Willie, not like hard work. It must Ja!It must look like romance."

"Hally: I oscillate between hope and despair for this world as well, Sam."

"Anybody who lets facts interfere with his imagination is a person who will never enjoy anything else again."

"There's nothing wrong with the world. It just goes around and around, and you gotta get on with your life."

"Mr. Sam was our father. He knew about our dreams and ambitions."

"I’m in the business of making people realize that their opinions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on."

"Aah, violence is the only way I can make people pay attention to me."

"There’s no question he’s smarter than I am, but does that give him the right to call me a name like that?"

"A hint of water, a whisper of foam. Long, white tails streaming behind them as they twist and turn in the bay."

"Without me breathing down your neck all the time, you’d lean even more to the right than you do now."

"You were scared of the ball because it was big and hard and could hurt you, just like life can hurt you."

"Somebody once said that there are only two places you can be alone—inside your mother’s womb and inside your coffin."

"I thought I was keeping it straight and I’ve suddenly wondered whether it is straight, and whether it matters whether it is or not."

"Doesn’t it sort of bug you that people like your dad can’t take care of the world?"

"Do you think Fathers do any more for their sons, except in terms of money, that Mothers do for their daughters."

"Don’t talk crap, Hally! You don’t even know what the word ‘sympathy’ means."

"She’s no match for him when it comes to a battle of words."

"Hally: It’s a bloody awful world when you come to think of it. People can be real bastards. Sam: That’s the way it is, Hally. Hally: It doesn’t have to be that way. There is something called progress you know. We don’t exactly burn people at the stake anymore."

"Hally: Anyway, that’s my man of magnitude. Charles Darwin! Who’s yours? Sam: [without hesitation] Abraham Lincoln. Hally: I might have guessed as much. Don’t get sentimental, Sam. You’ve never been a slave, you know. And anyway, we freed your ancestors here in South Africa long before the Americans."

"Hally: Not many intellectuals are prepared to shovel manure with the peasants then go home and write a ‘little book’ called War and Peace. Incidentally, Sam, he was somebody else who, to quote, ‘…did not distinguish himself scholastically."

"She would fulfil her obligations as she understood them and provide for them. The only way she could be a mother to her children, she saw, would be to leave them"

"Instead of being kind and buying this and that for the maid, just translate the kindness to this woman’s wages […]"

"once the white child reaches the age of five and has to start school, the black child becomes an embarrassment, a visible reminder of the inequalities endemic in the society"

"the morning paper, the Cape Times, carried the story of the child murdered on the beach. Front page, the story made"

"Today, no one knows the name of the little girl found in a rubbish drum at the back of the butcher’s shop. They don’t know it today, for they never knew it then"

"Now that the pass has gone"

"There are not enough mothers during the day to force the children to go to school and stay there for the whole day. The mothers are at work. Or they are drunk. Defeated by life. Dead. We die young, these days."

"Yet, even today we still laugh sad laughs, remembering our innocent incredulity. Our inability to imagine certain forms of evil, the scope and depth of some strains of ruthlessness. We laugh, to hide the gaping hole where our hearts used to be. Guguletu killed us . . . killed the thing that held us together . . . made us human. Yet, we still laugh."

"Mxolisi turned one year. A part of me hated him. Not him . . . but what he was . . . had been . . . the effect he seemed to have on my life. Always negative, always cheating me of something I desperately wanted. I shrunk; because he was."

"Unganyebelezeli, kuza kudlalwa!’ piped Mxolisi’s little voice, calling for daring and defiance. To look at him do the war cry of the Comrades, poised in a defiant stance, his tiny fist up in the air, couldn’t but send all those who heard him into paroxysms of laughter."

"There was nothing unusual about this. Mxolisi, now four years old, could already tell the difference between the bang! of a gun firing and the Gooph! of a burning skull cracking, the brain exploding."

"No,’ the girl’s mother said quietly. ‘There were many people there. Looking. Some were even laughing. None stopped the crime, none. Until your son arrived on the scene."

"Yes, Mzukulwana,’ he sighed, ‘the biggest storm is still here. It is in our hearts — the hearts of the people of this land. ‘For, let me tell you something, deep run the roots of hatred here. Deep. Deep. Deep."

"The sun went and died in the west."

"Tatomkhulu was a fund of facts that, although seemingly different, made a whole lot of sense of some of the things we learned at school. He explained what had seemed stupid decisions, and acts that had seemed indefensible became not only understandable but highly honourable."

"But now, my Sister-Mother, do I help him hide? Deliver him to the police? Get him a lawyer? Will that mean I do not feel your sorrow for your slain daughter? Am I your enemy? Are you mine? What wrong have I done you . . . or you me?"

"Your daughter. The imperfect atonement of her race. My son. The perfect host of the demons of his."

"She was not robbed. She was not raped. There was no quarrel. Only the eruption of a slow, simmering, seething rage. Bitterness burst and spilled her tender blood on the green autumn grass of a far-away land. Irredeemable blood. Irretrievable loss."

"One boy. Lost. Hopelessly lost. One girl, far away from home. The enactment of the deep, dark, private yearnings of a subjugated race. The consummation of inevitable senseless catastrophe."

"It is that wind it is that voice buzzing it is whispering and whistling in the wires miles upon miles upon miles on the wires in the wind in the subway track in the rolling road in the not silent bush it is the voice of the noise here it comes the Third World Express they must say, here we go again."

"O, go away, you steely monster! Why must you arrive so soon When I, at the moment, am lost in thought And wish that I could hide myself At home among the mielie-stalks, Covered with cobs, surrounded by pumpkins; For there I should never be disturbed By bustling crowds of chattering people Passing noisily on their way: I see them at dawn, I see them at dusk – At sunrise and sunset they pass me by."

"That exactly is how my father and mother met and became man and wife. There were no home ceremonials, such as the seeking and obtaining of parental consent, because there were no parent; no conferences by uncles and grand-uncles, or exhortations by grandmothers and aunts; no male relatives to arrange the marriage knot, nor female relations to herald the family union, and no uncles of the bride to divide the bogadi (dowry) cattle as, of course, there were no cattle. It was a simple matter of taking each other for good and or ill with the blessing of the ‘God of Rain’. The forest was their home, the rustling trees their relations, the sky their guardian and the birds, who sealed the marriage contract with the songs, the only guests. Here they stablished their home and names it Re-Nosi (We-are-alone)."

"Never be led by a female lest thou fall over a precipice."

"The viewpoint of the ruler is not always the viewpoint of the ruled."

"Chief Moroka was not as great an orator as most of the Native chiefs but he excelled in philosophy. In that respect his witty expressions and dry humour were equal to those of Moshueshue, the Basuto King. He spoke in a staccato voice, with short sentences and a stop after each, as though composing the next sentence. His speeches abounded in allegories and proverbial sayings, some traditional and others spontaneous. His own maxims had about them the spice of originality which always provided his auditors with much food for thought."

"The forests shook with the awful thunder of the guns, which stirred a wild agitation among the denizens of the day. Terrified game of every description scattered in all directions and fled for dear life; oxen bellowed in surprise and wild hounds yelped, wolves and jackals ran as though possessed by a legion of devils. Wild birds rushed out of their nests and protested loudly against the unholy disturbance of the peace of their haunts."

"A man was not made to live alone. Had it not been for Mhudi, I don’t think you would have known me at all. She made me what I am. I feel certain that your manhood will never be recognized as long as you remain wifeless."

"So long as there are two men left on earth there will be war."

"One party went to far away Zimbabwe and returned with pack-oxen loaded with ivory, rhinoceros hides, lion skins and hog tusks. They reported finding a people whose women dug the mountain sides for nuggets and brittle stones, which they brought home to boil and produce a beautiful metal from which to mould bangles and ornaments of rare beauty. That was the Matebele’s first experience of gold smelting."

"There’s always a return to the ruins, only to the womb there is no return."

"A hasty dog always burns his mouth."

"No one knows what the elephant ate to make it so big."

"De Bruyn had tried to fit her feet into a pair of his late wife's shoes, but the foot of a female slave who has walked many weary miles on her own tough soles is very different from that of the idle lady wife of a Director General of the Westindische Compagnie; and so, under her spreading skirt, Ama's feet remained unshod."

"A lonely man, Quaque, too. He despises his own people for the heathens that they are. He is really a kind of black Englishman. He says the English tongue was sent by heaven as a medium for religion and civilisation. On that account he will not use his native Fanti and indeed he claims he can no longer speak it or understand it."

"He sees every female slave as just a vagina on two legs, she thought bitterly, not for the first time."

"Curiosity is unbecoming in the female sex. This girl's curiosity surely comes from your teaching her to read. An ability to read is prejudicial in any woman, in a slave doubly and triply so. It opens them to ideas unsuited to their station in life."

"If you examine the weapons closely you will soon discern the reason. Warfare is endemic on this part of the coast. Most of the slaves who come to us are prisoners of war. If we did not sell arms and ammunition, there would certainly be less warfare and the supply of slaves might dry up. There is, however, a distinction between between the quality of arms required for such local warfares as will ensure us a steady supply of slaves, and weaponry that might pose a threat to ourselves. Beyond that we do of course exercise some discrimination in the choice of our customers: we would not want even weapons of inferior quality turning up in the hands of potential enemies."

"Our greatest enemy is not the whites. It is our own disunity. They know that, of course, and they encourage it. Their Christian religion is one of the weapons they use to divide us. That, by the way, was why I disturbed you when you told me the book you were reading was their Bible."

"It is not different, really, here in the city. Just like back in the village, we live our lives together as one. We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people’s closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, ‘They say it once happened…’ we are the ‘they’. No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems it fit."

"We go for what we call a joll. All it means is that we engage in an orgy of drinking, raping, and stabbing one another with knives and shooting one another with guns."

"You have always been good at creating beautiful things with your hands."

"We are like two hands that wash each other."

"By the time he has finished, every inch of the walls is covered with bright pictures – a wallpaper of sheer luxury."

"In those days, they did not allow people of his colour onto any of the beaches of the city, so he could not carry out his ablutions there, as he does today."

"Funerals were held only on Saturday and Sunday mornings those days, because death was not as prevalent then as it is at present."

"Hymns flow into one another in unplanned but pleasant segues."

"It is strange how things don’t change in these shanty towns or squatter camps or informal settlements or whatever you choose to call them."

"You see, they say they are fighting for freedom, yet they are no different from the tribal chief and his followers. They commit atrocities as well."

"Men, on the other hand, tend to cloud their heads with pettiness and vain pride. They sit all day and dispense wide-ranging philosophies on how things should be. With great authority in their voices, they come up with wise theories on how to put the world right. Then at night they demand to be given food, as if the food just walked into the house on its own. *When they believe all the children are asleep, they want to be pleasured. The next day they wake up and continue with their empty theories."

"When they believe all the children are asleep, they want to be pleasured. The next day they wake up and continue with their empty theories."

"Bhonco is different from the other Unbelievers in his family, for Unbelievers are reputed to be such somber people that they do not believe even in those things that can bring happiness to their lives. They spend most of their time moaning about past injustices and bleeding for the world that would have been had the folly of belief not seized the nation a century and a half ago and spun it around until it was in a woozy stupor that is felt to this day.”"

"The Cult of the Unbelievers began with Twin-Twin. Bhonco Ximiya’s ancestor, in the days of the Prophetess Nongqawuse almost one hundred and fifty years ago. The revered Twin-Twin had elevated unbelieving to the heights of religion.”"

"Yes, Bhonco carries the scars that were inflicted on his great-grandfather, Twin-Twin, by men who flogged him after he had been identified as a wizard by Prophet Mlanjeni, the Man of the River. Every first boy-child in subsequent generations of Twin-Twin’s tree is born with the scars.”"

"Camagu has no heart to tell her that Athens is a college town that is even smaller than the nearby town of Butterworth*."

"The villagers will actually lose more than they will gain from the few jobs that will be created. Very little of the money that is made here will circulate in the village."

"The boats are now restored to their former glory as a reminder of a bygone era and bygone manual practices so that present and future generations can see how fishermen of the old endured the stormy seas in small open boats powered by their own muscles."

"Conversely, Noria’s memory of the village is the pale herd boys, with mucus hang- ing from the nostrils, looking after cattle whose ribs you could count, on barren hills with sparse grass and shrups. The lean cattle and barren hills are partly result of overgrazing, which is in turn due to shortage of land for black people."

"They do not like to be called squatters. How can we be squatters on our land, in our own country? Squatters are those who came from across the sea to steal our land"

"For instance, when the Whale Caller wants to consummate relationship with his wife, images of whale interfere at the moment of ex- citement and he goes limp"

"He has neither touched a whale nor even Sharisha, except with his spirit - with his horn. He knows absolutely that this boat-based whale watching will be abused"

"They rig Sharisha with dynamite. [...] the emergency workers place more than five hundred kilograms of dynamite in all the strategie places, especially close to Sharisha's head. Like a high priest in a ritual sacrifice a man stands over a contraption that is connected to the whale with a long red cable. With all due solemnity he triggers the explosives. Sharisha goes up in a gigantic baU of smoke and flame. [...] [The Whale Caller] is looking intently at the red, yellow and white flames as Sharisha rises in the sky. It is like Guy Fawkes fireworks"

"Yet there is nothing that rises, phoenix-like, out of the ashes. All the Whale Caller can do at the scene of the explosion is sit "silent and still as blubber rains on him. Until he is completely larded with it""

"Lunga Tubu's voice coming from the waves, singing a Pavarotti song," he muses wistfully that "maybe one day Pavarotti will adopt him""

"Botswana. It is not called Bechuanaland any more now."

"I can't stand those voices! Those baboons there, sitting there talking."

"It was no use trying to speak to him. The long painful years of contact with the whites had developed within him a hard protective core of indifference to all their constant abusive reprimands. He was dead inside, I thought."

"Don't call me Nanny, your Nanny is looking after your kids at your house."

"For him as well as Aggripa, this is home. Adam will only leave here when he's a corpse. Where can he go to? He is a "foreign native", a Rhodesian. He has to remain tied to Mr Block for the rest of his life like a slave; he has been sold to him and may not leave him for another master. At least I'm free."

"And I thought to myself, to think that my poor little niece is not even aware that she is so important. That her innocent request to pay me a visit can be regarded as a threat to the security of the great Republic of South Africa."

"These damnable laws which dictate to you where, and next to whom, you shall walk, sit, stand and lie... This whole abominable nauseating business of toilets and "separate but equal facilities"... What is one to do anyway? One is forever in a trap from which there is no escape... except suicide..."

"My handwriting had never looked so beautiful. I had at last decided to free myself of the shackles which had bound not only my hands, but also my soul."

"...flotsam from the fatherland."

"Specific silences imposed by certain historical conjunctions."

"[t]hrough perceiving the world as a story to be told and endlessly reshaped, I would argue, the reader is actually encouraged to act upon the world (..) literature becomes more, not less, potent"

"History provides one of the most fertile silences to be revisited by South African writers because the dominant discourse of white historiography (...) has inevitably silenced, for so long,so many other possibilities."

"Address two silences simultaneously: that created by the marginalization of women,and that effected by a (white-dominated) master-narrative of history."

"Attempt to grasp, with the creative imagination, the past and its silences."

"She did what no one had thought possible."

"Uncovers the dark places into which we may fear to look."

"Even during the days and nights when she was dazed and only half awake the stories must have insinuated themselves into her torn and bruised body like draughts and ointments with healing powers beyond all explanation. (There is no pain and no badness,) she still hears the dry voice of old Taras in her ear, that a story cannot cure."

"Attempt new strategies which will convert previous defeats into victory."

"How curious, this urge they have, all of them, to leave their mark on a woman's body. As if despair lies behind it, and fear, (..) In each theneed, the terrifying urge, to scar and leave his mark. And only her body available for their inscription."

"I believe more and more that as a man I owe it to herat least to try to understand what makes her a person, an individual,what defines her as a woman."

"Violence our language. A land hostile, empty, strange: it does not talk back, remains inaccessible. Which forces this violence from us,its motive achingly pure. On and one we move through the evermore arid landscape, sowing destruction as we go (....) An orgy of blood (...) with the single purpose of leaving on that virgin barren place the scrawl of our progress. We were here to acquire, to conquer, to have, to possess: I have therefore I am. Land, you are woman. Woman, you are mine."

"I’m busy documenting a thousand stories about Johannesburg. Oral histories? No, stories. People don’t always speak the truth."

"This is Africa, my friends … These folks do things differently. Sven Taxel, who regards himself as an expert on South Africa because he has read Wilbur Smith, Rian Malan and André Brink, tries to calm his fellow congregation members."

"What happened wasn’t a revolution. It was a deal. The creation of a new bunch of entrepreneurs who could be more easily manipulated by international capital."

"But Sara has spent enough time in the darkness to know that you often have to remain there for a long time before you’re ready for the light again."

"So I am not exactly sure what I imagine and what I remember. Is there a difference? Not much, if you ask me."

"My education had equipped me to suffer in silence, a form of passive endurance. Even though I know nothing about being brave, I soon realised that self-denial was like self-immolation. It was a state of stasis that relieved one of the responsibility to change things."

"One could only hope that this country, which had always been poor – not through a lack of resources, but because Portugal had decided that this was to be the country’s fate- would finally develop to its full potential."

"I thought again about the contradiction Mozambique was. On the one hand there were people like Dona Maria, compassionate and caring, and on the other hand there was those who had no concern for the people in this country."

"It didn’t matter which side you were on. It was an empty, cavernous world in which young boys groped around in the dark, dreading the next step, which might be on a landmine or into a booby trap. It was a world of death. No one came out of it unscathed. It was a world with only one law: kill or be killed."

"On the way we encountered many other people: families on the move, women wearily limping along behind their men, carrying bundles on their heads and babies strapped on their backs, their children tottering alongside, dragging behind them bags and baskets overflowing with artefacts of their dislocated lives."

"All along the path into the village we encountered rebel militiamen – barefooted, wearing ragged uniforms, carrying rifles and bandoliers. They were obviously locals recruited from surrounding villages. This was rebel territory, and men like these, who seemed to flit in and out of the bush like shadows, dispersing at will, were the very foundation of the revolution. It was this shadowy existence that allowed them to survive incursions by the military. The women were no different: they milled around us, full of curiosity, babies in one arm and a rifle on the other. Their needs were simple. They were men and women who had spent their lives surviving in the forest and who knew that environment better than anyone else. They needed very little to flourish there, and could subsist on berries and whatever small creatures the forest floor offered. Because families like these endured incessant harassment and even bombardment from military forces, they were able to cope with extreme hardship. They owned nothing, except what they could roll into a small bundle and carry with them."

"David had once told me that there was no sky as totally black as the African sky, where the stars hung so low that one could almost reach out to pluck them from the heavens."

"The deserters and dissenters expelled from the party formed RENAMO, a rebel group committed to snatching power from FRELIMO. Supported by South Africa and Rhodesia, who did not want a socialist government on their doorsteps, RENAMO conducted a campaign of terror, destabalisation and plunder, murdered hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans. It was a tragedy and travesty of the worst kind. It was a conflict that surpassed the brutality of the war in Vietnam: RENAMO, it was said, outdid the Cambodian Khmer Rouge in cruelty, perpetrating some of the most inhumane acts against their own people, with the full knowledge, support and encouragement of Mozambique’s white-ruled neighbours."

"I just hope that it would not go the way of other independent black nations, which had allowed their resources to plundered by large foreign multinational companies and leaders hungry for wealth and power."

"The old man made a small, honking, animal noise and dropped back on the bed."

"The law don't like white people being finished off. Well I didn't mos mean it. Better get out before somebody comes. I never been in here. He looked at the sprawled figure that looked like a blown down scarecrow. Well he didn't have no right living here with us Coloreds."

"That's all they know. Shooting us people."

"We all good enough to be servants. Because we’re black, they think we good enough just to change their nappies."

"I’m not saying a person can change it tomorrow or next year. But even if you don’t get what you want today, soon, it’s a matter of pride, dignity...."

"Trouble. There’s always trouble.’ He spoke as if trouble was something he experienced all the time, but trouble was a stranger to her."

"Anger grew inside him like a ripening seed and the tendrils of its burgeoning writhed along his bones, through his muscles, into his mind."

"In the foyer of the offices of the petroleum company where Isaac worked, a woman with tired, bleached hair and the face of a painted wax doll accidentally left near a fire and then hastily retrieved, kept guard in the little telephone exchange behind polished plate glass and mahogany."

"Life has, for Beukes, become like a gangster movie, filled with"

"But memories got left behind while you kept walking on; every time you had to retrace your steps further to return to your memories, and sometimes it was better not to turn back at all."

"unhappiness was something you got used to or something that passed."

"...What was there to wish for... a wish asked for the unattainable. The impossible."

"God forgives many things, but God never forgives us the wrong we do to a child."

"Get your hands to work, Selling, none of us can understand it."

"To hear, after nine years, that they had found a child that might be yours, was not news that you could take lightly. And if it was the child they had found, only the Lord in Heaven could know how he had got over the mountain to the Long Kloof."

"What is it that is troubling you? You’re young, but your eyes are old."

"An ostrich took a mate for life. It was their nature. Why try and mess up nature? Was the new prosperity not enough for them? …Where would it end?"

"...the fruit of the vice, the folly, the thoughtlessness of the white man. In the old days - taking one aspect of the matter - there were colonists who, like the Biblical patriarchs or monarchs, had their official and their unofficial households, their white wives and their Hottentot hand-maids. But they used their slave-women as Abraham used Hagar rather than as Solomon used the Shulamite."

"We are all God's children.....Perhaps, we brown people are His stepchildren."

"And yet the less civilised white peasant of Europe is to this extent the coloured man's superior: the blood in him is stronger for advancement."

"Given the opportunity, the descendant of serfs may be a Tchekov. But the child of colour, unless his colour is attenuated to the verge of vanishing point, does not seem to have in him the ability to rise. It is as if the offspring of the originally mixed unions had, through generations, and through circumscription of life and interbreeding, achieved a definite, inferior, and static race: a race not given to wildness (its mothers were savages, but they were slaves); a race with something old and civilised about it (its fathers were Europeans); a race made up of weak materials and without the capacity for spiritual or intellectual growth."

"There are some who suggest that mixed breeds, unless replenished in a generation or two with the blood of one of the original stocks, tend to die out."

"....the whites are the conquerors and all is theirs. A man's one hope is among the whites.... The thing for the Buys-volk to do is to get back to the whites."

"I do not not own life, you often said when you tried to laugh your difficulties away."

"You have watched God and Devil, gods and Ancestors, wondering whether *they* owned it, this thing called life. As far as you could see no one seemed to own it, judging by the way they too cast their eyes in the directions of our Hillbrow, Alexandra, and Tiragalong, clicking their tongues in deep sadness or grim amusement as people devoured one another. You were right there with them, still on your way to finding out whether any of them owned life."

"And while we’re so busy blaming [the Makwerekwere] for all our sins, hadn’t we better also admit that quite a large percentage of our home relatives who get killed in Hillbrow are in fact killed by other relatives who bring their home grudges with them to Jo’burg. That’s what makes Hillbrow so corrupt…"

"...people should remain in their own countries and try to sort out the problems of those respective countries, rather than fleeing them; South Africa had too many problems of its own."

"From the day whe arrived at her husband's home, no one called her by her name."

"The women are experts at waiting - for husbands, for rain, for unborn children."

"Yet, he knew that he did not understand anything about the place or its people or its problems."

"He said it all depended on his employer; but what did his employer know about her, or her body or their need for a baby? How could he plan their life without them?"

"It galled him that anybody should think him inferior."

"Things in the country moved at a snail's pace, but they did arrive in the end, and when they did they would crash in fury over people's heads"

"In one convulsive moment Zenzile died."

"And we do not want passes. They have enslaved our men—and we do not want to carry them."

"Why don’t they do something so we can handle this once and for all! They’re wearing me down!"

"My chubby little brother! Perhaps he’s having a little ‘crisis of conscience’!’ perhaps, because of their culture."

"For my grandmother, Esther Makatini, who washed white people's clothes so that I could learn to write."

"In a few days I am to die. Strange, the idea neither shocks nor frightens me…"

"We were lovers in everything but in name."

"Apartheid? We had defeated apartheid. We had finally perfected a method of making love even without making contact, utilizing empty space like two telepathic media exchanging telegraphic messages through sexual airways."

"...as I was to later find out, the skin was neither soft nor the hair so smooth as I had first imagined."

"Good gracious, man! Are you trying to tell the court that your people had never heard of orgies before the white man came to this continent?"

"Why believe the word of the girl against mine,... Except for the whiteness of her skin, a color that has caused more trouble and unhappiness in the world than the color of any other skin, what particular claim to virtue can this girl be supposed to have?"

"No, I'll die of a vaster, deeper, more cruel conspiracy by the ruler of my country who have made a certain knowledge between persons of different races not only impossible to achieve but positively dangerous even to attempt to acquire. They have made contact between the races a cause for profoundest alarm among white citizens."

"The day you come across my uncle Sekala no-one will need to point him out to you! Try to imagine a monster six-foot-ten, with a face like a train locomotive or the front of Mount Taba Situ, and you have the exact image of my uncle. Children have been known to cry when he has but looked at them; an attempt at a smile from him is likely to send children running for shelter behind their mother's skirts. When he makes a joke he smiles so hard that his eyes seem to close up and vanish, bringing to perfection his exceptional ugliness!"

"Bulane was dressed in faded old khakis, somewhat soiled and torn and sprinkled with mud, and although this was the height of summer on the highveld and the sun would soon be scorchingly hot, he was swathed in a thick army coat that looked frayed and moth-eaten, like something which might have been bequeathed to an importunate servant by a jokey employer."

"Oh Mr Bulane, what a sight to greet the plains of Tabanyane!"

"Bohm’s solution was simple and logical. We have been wrongly interpreting the nature of matter and the universe itself. The message never travelled across space and time at all because both these constructs are an illusion brought about by the brain. In fact the two particles were really one particle all the time and as such they both ‘knew’ what was happening to each of them."

"The function of the brain and the nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and otherwise irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive."

"It was once said that religion explains in terms of agents what science explains in terms of processes."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work… Black man cleans the streets but mustn’t walk freely on the pavement; Black man must build houses for the white man but cannot live in them; Black man cooks the white man’s food but eats what is left over."

"We’d never really known father before. And now living close to him and seeing him at close quarters, I realised that his face was unlikeable."

"You’ll come back and be able to look after yourself and the two you’re leaving behind."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work…"

"When they were not working they had children without being able to secure a man they could really call a husband."

"The first time I saw him I thought, he won't last."

"So for a while I had two lives: one that was empty and adrift, in the hospital by day and another that was illicit and intense, by the side of the road at night. The one had nothing to do with the other."

"Innovation and change: it was one of her key phrases, a mantra she liked to repeat. But it was empty. Ruth Ngema would go to great lengths to avoid any innovation or change, because who knew what might follow on?""

"He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly."

"All the images and impressions and countries and continents he'd vised had been erased. What you don't remember never happened."

"And maybe that is the true reason for this journey, by shedding all the ballast of the familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else traveling is like free-fall, or flight."

"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were."

"The moment the metal box speaks her name, she knows it’s happened. She’s been in a tense, headachy mood all day, almost like she had a warning in a dream but can’t remember what it is. Some sign or image, just under the surface. Trouble down below. Fire underground."

"They park in the driveway under the awning, with its beautiful green and purple and orange stripes. Beyond it, a diorama of white South Africa, the tin-roofed suburban bungalow made of reddish face brick, surrounded by a moat of bleached garden. Jungle gym looking lonely on a big brown lawn. Concrete birdbath, a Wendy house and a swing made from half a truck tyre."

"[Ockie] imagines himself one of his Voortrekker ancestors, rolling slowly into the interior in an ox-wagon. Yes, there are those who dream in predictable ways. Ockie the brave pioneer, floating over the plain. A brown-and-yellow countryside passes outside, dry except for where a river cuts through it, under a huge Highveld sky."

"I write furiously, admonishing myself when I seem about to fall into the old habit of editing sentences as they appear. I want to discover what it is I am going to be writing about, who is in the story and what they are doing there."

"Since I am a slow writer and a compulsive editor, I try not to stop too often"

"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"

"I put my head in my hands and try to get quiet, quieter and quieter, and the thin membrane, the invisible connective tissue around the part of my brain that holds my memory, that allows me to stay focused on the present, begins to slide through - emotion makes it happen easily - and through the thready openings memory begins to come through, healing memory, slowly, in great detail, slowly, there is no rush, it must be firmly built up. From this comes self-healing."

"And as if you were transported on an escalator from one floor to the other, and could not get off, so time unyieldingly transports you away from your husband's death. But the loss of a son or daughter, it pours out the sadness, also on you, no matter how long ago, it's still there, always there."

"I like it and it is a great way to pass the time. Initially, I just thought I could write; now I know I can. . Interview question- Why do you write?"

"Experimental writing inspires me. I get my ideas from reading, traveling, and talking."

"Personally? To be recognized. On a larger scale: less dumbing down in readers."

"I went to a writing workshop with Lionel Abrahams."

"I have two books – one a sort of travel book, experimental, with pictures by an artist, another a novel based on the life of Rimbaud. Both are in waiting for a publisher but these are hard to find these days."

"I can write at any time of the day or night. If someone knocks on the door, I can stop typing in the middle of a sentence. I can then sit and chat and when the gas is gone, just resume waar I quit. I don't have to wait for the inspiration or the mood."

"Writing can't be done for leisure, but for me it's a joy of life and I love writing every day."

"I am a Christian and deeply religious, and life is a lot of joy and beautiful things for me. I accept each day as he comes, and try to make the best of it. You don't know in advance what will come your way every day. I trust only in the Lord, because He is always with me and not my strength."

"There's always such a buzz coming over me when I'm on a farm. A farm you have to live. But you can look at the city, you don't have to live it."

"I'm just always writing, I think it's in my system. The time when I was busiest as a principal's wife with three children in the house, I wrote the most. I've wondered a lot how one quits. At a job you retire, but with writing?"

"My favourite genre remains the short story, although it is the most difficult because one has to be able to say so much with so few words. Writing books is much more difficult than for the radio, but with the radio story you work at a pace again and you simply have to write every day."

"I write recreational reading material because I feel relaxed when I write. I never think about a specific target group or a 'someone', but just write for people."

"My childhood was full of happiness and fun," Dricky told Naln. "Playing pop, kennetji, horseback riding, and so on were daily entertainments. And in the evening in the shiny, white moonlight, we frolicked on the sand dunes. When the summer days were oppressively hot, I often walked through the green vineyards to the river. Under the shady trees as I gazed across the gently flowing waters to the sand dunes on the other side, which held a wonderful charm for those who knew and loved them, my first imaginary reverie began. In my imagination, I imagined many a Bible story so vividly that I was unaware of my surroundings. Later, I started writing stories, but I was very modest about it and carefully kept them deep away."

"Sometimes I just hear something on the radio, in a conversation, and then it captures my imagination. It then becomes a starting point for a new story. For example, a friend told me one day that she dreamed of ripe fruit. This is how Ripe Fruit became the title of one of my books. When a framed photo of my son fell off the wall one day, the frame broke while the glass remained intact. This gave rise to the short story Glass in the Frame."

"I’m a romantic. Perhaps at a push, we could fit this novel in among the Romantics. But I think it’s better placed as Gothic though I’m not Gothic."

"I’m particularly interested in Balthazar and his study of the stars and planets, and the courageous way in which he challenges the status quo of the known universe."

"Yes, I wrote these verses to complement each of the Parts One, Two and Three. Each verse places a solitary figure on a landscape and so sets a contemplation in place. But the epic poem, the one that appears in Part Two and then accompanies the novel to its end, I only started writing about half-way through the novel and completed it at the end. The epic poem took my final attention and care. It had to appear as an ancient text, with some parts lost."

"Sarah Clayton made a podcast with my husband, Don Pinnock, who is an expert on youth at risk. She was looking at the connection between the roots of criminality in childhoods where a love and respect of animals is not nurtured. Don introduced me to Sarah, and we agreed to work together to teach children, through stories and poems, to love animals, nature and the wilderness."

"No, this is not my first book for children. But the “ethos” in all those I have written is consistent. They all evoke compassion and care and are rich in love of the environment."

"The book has been very well received. Our first distribution was through direct sales and donations to children and projects that might not have afforded the book. We are now preparing to reprint, and the book will go into retail bookshops. We are also working on an Afrikaans edition."

"I wanted to give a sense of: “Come with me and let’s look at some wonderful, natural things, and let’s have fun, but let’s also learn together to cherish each other and all living things.” So, the first “voice” belongs to Phoebe as she invites the young reader to travel with her, and the book concludes with her basically empowering the child to take care of the earth."

"The greatest thing about writing fiction is you don't know where the story is going. When I was writing Hlomu I became her - you internalise the character and you let her lead you"

"February has always been a dull month for me, a dreadful period where I’m tired and irritable. My sister says it’s my mind rebooting itself. I say I don’t know and I don’t care because, ironically, it is also the period where I’m most creative."

"at no point in my life did I sit down in a garden and inhale fresh air, watch flowers blooming under the blue sky and become inspired to write about broken men and the women who try to fix them"

"I don’t have a sacred writing space, but I do write better after midnight, when I’m surrounded by creative energy"

"The stories I write come from being a black woman in South Africa, the friendships and relationships I have had, families and what we perceive as love"

"It is them — because they are still buying my books and hyping them even five years later — who motivate me to continue writing"

"So many things have come out of my writing journey and the risk I took to publish myself. The best one is the growing fearlessness about telling our stories as they are and using familiar language to tell them."

"I don't think anything inspires creativity for me. I just wanted to write a story about black people."

"I'd rather someone talk to me about the characters in my books than my style of writing. I wanted it to appeal to someone on a social grant, to someone in an executive office."

"The fact that you have a gift that is different from a lot of people… that you can create things and the understanding of the value of that and what it can do for you. You need to understand what intellectual property is. Artists and creators, rarely ever consult an intellectual property attorney or ask questions or some of them don’t even know that those exist. So, you need to have that information. The research and the knowledge and protecting what you have created, there are ways to protect what you do"

"It’s very difficult to adapt a book into a film, especially a fictional book where I have the freedom to do whatever I want to do with the characters."

"It is our responsibility as storytellers to promote a reading culture to communities, many of which are marginalised."

"Reading opens one’s mind to different things and different worlds and expands horizons"

"In order to create a culture of reading among children, we need to make books accessible to them and write stories they can relate to"

"The truth is I would have been fine i it had flopped, because at that time I wasn't as invested as I am now in the business."

"Sometimes I don't even like or agree with her, but I can't change her or tame her just because I'm not happy with her decisions."

"I’m the most known person who isn’t a celebrity"

"If the assumption that I’m influential is true, then that’s the one issue I’m willing to speak about, openly and honestly."

"I have rejected many ‘influencer’ deals, turned down many celebrity event invitations (not because there’s anything wrong with them, but because I know my limits and complications"

"There are things that you can’t translate into English, if you tried the sentence would be completely flat"

"It takes guts, patience and a lot of hard work. I think anyone who is passionate about writing and wants to own and be in control of their creativity can do it. I used my own money to publish, which was risky because I wasn’t sure how well my book was going to do. It took a while before the money I made from book sales was actual profit. But I’m at a great place now"

"I think i just love danger"

"If you re not surprised, how do you expect the reader to be surprised?"

"We can have the policies and constitution in the world, but if we're not working on these issues at home and school, then we're never going to get it right."

"Don't allow anyone or anything to make yo feel like you cannot fulfill whatever it is that your heart says you're here to fulfill."

"Living in South Africa, crime is something that is always with us, in our conscious and subconscious minds"

"Flashiness is off-putting, but it is something that we live with amongst the black middle class – with people who made a lot of money very quickly. I understand the temptation to say, I started at the bottom, now I’m here, and I want everyone to see. But at the same time, it just puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on people. That’s why, right now, mental health issues are such a big thing in society – it’s not the only reason, but it is one of them"

"There is always that question: is this who we are as a society? How do we question our value system and what that means for the society we are raising"

"It was tricky trying to find the balance between the producers’ instincts on what works on screen versus the creator’s instincts for what their character would or would not do in a certain situation"

"As much as my writing is diverse and sometimes straddles different categories, it’s clear that placing any of my books under a section marked “chick lit” is patently sexist"

"If all African writers only wrote about race (for instance), which is a major factor that contributes to the inequalities faced by black people across the world, we would miss the opportunity to bring out the other human aspects of our people"

"In a country that has as many inequalities as ours, volunteering should be second nature"

"The fear from an author normally stems from having to let go of something that you have birthed and nurtured."

"I just think women are so much more than that, we have so much more to offer than our beauty and body."

"Writing is a very cathartic experience and I use it to address my fears"

"There are not enough hours in the day to explore the lives of men and women in their daily struggles with poverty, hunger and disease"

"Storytellers will never go out of business. It’s all a work in progress. An egg waiting to be hatched."

"It is enough to have imagined, but it helps to have lived through the circumstances"

"If you are a human being the huge ethical debates will rest with you in the snarling loneliness of midnight"

"Home and exile are not geographic places"

"Post-apartheid South Africa has failed to take advantage of the goodwill of the world and harness African solidarity"

"Certain chroniclers of our past have pushed out of the frame the little man and woman whose contribution towards the creation of a democratic South Africa was immeasurable"

"In our haste to promote an unproblematic and amnesiac Rainbow Nation, we have rewarded murderers with medals and even loosed some of them to speak for us in exalted councils"

"Every writer enjoys a challenge that plunges him or her into uncharted waters"

"The new buzzword is ‘erasure’ and it is my belief that great people, especially if they stand for ideals that are inimical to the interests of the powerful, are erased via misinterpretation"

"It is my belief that in accepting Mandela in all his complex configurations, we can start coming to terms with the kind of greatness we are collectively capable of reaching"

"If you go to a Catholic Church in South Africa, it’s a far cry from what you are familiar with in France or Europe"

"We dance! This is Africa"

"the priests have been guilty of many, many things in their private capacity, not as representative of the church per se – you know, the child abuse and all those things"

"the people who colonized us used religion as an excuse, as an entry point, into this country."

"So they used religion – Christianity to be more specific – to deceive us"

"I still believe that the liberation theology movement did make an impact"

"Yes. Christianity, to many black people – especially in KZN1 which was then Natal or Zululand – was an escape"

"We pretend that queerness or homosexuality is a new phenomenon. It’s always been there. It’s there in our songs and historical books but it’s something that we’re, like, ashamed of"

"another stereotype – at least in contemporary society – that is associated with queer men, is that they are more feminine, which again is not true"

"I wanted to explore black people’s presence in the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa. Because in all the texts that I’ve read, both nonfiction and fiction, black people are absent, so I wanted to bring that"

"If I want to tell a story successfully in a manner that is going to grab my readers, I have to be competitive, I can’t write as if I’m writing back in the 1960s"

"You have to be very careful as you are writing. Not too much preaching or teaching at the expense of entertainment. At the same time, you don’t want to be superficial."

"Migration impacted the lives of black people a lot in South Africa – forced migration – because it was always against our own will"

"I’ve seen some historical novelists playing with facts, that is just distasteful, disrespectful as to history"

"I find it works to draw people because history can be intimidating. But if you infuse it with some humor, it becomes more palatable in a way"

"I am not a reporter, I write opinions"

"We’re a country that is trying to find itself as a nation. We are not a nation"

"We have yet to formulate or to forge a common identity that says “South Africa""

"If you were a foreigner coming to South Africa, and you read the books, you will think black people do not exist"

"fiction projects today’s reality into the future much better than nonfiction"

"Being that young, I had to navigate the precarious space of being a colleague to these men, but also to be a child to them. When they were wrong on editorial matters, it was difficult for me to categorically tell them they were incorrect. I had to find euphemisms to put my points across. I didn’t always succeed"

"South African history, particularly that which has been forgotten or generally unknown, into the forefront so that it may not disappear into the past…to reignite unfinished conversations around issues of race, identity and land, for example"

"Writing a novel is like running a marathon"

"Contrary to popular belief, writing a short story is more difficult than writing a novel. A short story needs a clear focus, from beginning to end. In a novel there can be unnecessary deviations — which you can’t afford in a short story"

"systematically and deliberately tackle heavy subjects in my writing"

"As a novelist, I am concerned with the ways in which communities transform their historical experience into the symbolic terms of myth, and then use mythologised narratives of the past to organise their responses to real-world, present-day crises and events"

"Historical fiction can be a powerful tool in the hands of a writer who is also an activist"

"My job as a novelist is to record what happened back then, but to also raise a flag, to caution that the country still has some unfinished business"

"If we don’t resolve the issue of land redistribution decisively, and in a manner that takes full cognisance of the extent to which the majority was robbed, it may come to haunt us. It happened to our neighbour, Zimbabwe."

"Historical novels show us how the origins of many present-day problems lie in the past; they are vehicles for the necessary journeys that nations must take to be healed; they help us reimagine ourselves in the present day"

"The South African publishing industry is still largely in white hands."

"I have realised that the so called writer's block comes when the writing muscle does not get exercised as often as it should be"

"What comes to my mind when I think of South African literature is awareness and education"

"I’m not much of a follower of South African literary prizes. I think most of them are not a true reflection of the rich and diverse literary landscape in the country"

"Joburg is part of me and I’m part of Joburg, once you live in Joburg, it touches you more than hands can ever do"

"I write to edutain and cathart. I write to educate, entertain and heal myself."

"Read, read, and read a lot, then write even if it doesn’t make sense at the moment"

"The second book is always a challenge because of the reception the first book received"

"If you don’t develop eyes in the back of your head, you won’t survive in Joburg. It’s a university without a professor."

"there is this idea of home being linked to love, but there are homes that are terrible, and then one has to find solace, sometimes in the most unexpected places"

"I’m very sceptical about book prizes and always have mixed feelings when they are announced"

"At some point I was said to be a ‘Kwaito generation’ writer and this sometimes came with negative stereotypes, as if I didn’t belong to the ‘writers club’ yet"

"Of course it would have been great if writing yielded some pecuniary benefits, but I’m still satisfied with the opportunities and the profile I have built for myself over the years"

"Mainstream publishing houses were not really connected to South African readers"

"I think every writer is, one way or the other, a literary diplomat, whether travelling or not"

"I lament the fact that everything good that represents Joburg has shifted and that the attention of city planners is now focused on places like Rosebank and Sandton, leaving the city centre neglected"

"Something always dies when the lion feeds — and yet there is meat for those that follow him."

"When a traveller gets a thorn in his foot," Mbejane went on softly, "and he is wise, he plucks it out — and he is a fool, he leaves it and says, 'I will keep this thorn to prick me so that I will always remember the road upon which I have travelled.' Nkosi, it is better to remember with pleasure than with pain."

"Beware of your most implacable enemy — yourself."

"They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy — just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it."

"Should five slaves dictate to a king? If five baboons bark, must the black-maned lion tremble?"

"Robin Hood was also a terrorist ― but he had some style and a little class."

"It's an old chestnut, but those set to guard a treasure, are too often those who loot it."

"It’s a strange paradox that a man gifted with too many talents can fritter them all away without developing a single one to its full."

"History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead."

"Rage makes a man sick, my son. It spoils his appetite for life and keeps him from sleep at night. We cannot change our world, so we must look for the good things in life and enjoy those to the full."

"The best cure for racism is have somebody shoot at you. Man, it does not matter then what colour the arse is that comes to save yours — black or white, you’re ready to give it a big fat kiss."

"A cynic had defined aid as simply the system by which poor white people in rich countries gave money to rich black people in poor countries to put into Swiss bank accounts."

"No profit was too small to despise; no loss was too small to abhor."

"War is the game played by old men with the lives of the young."

"'A man follows the path laid out for him. He does his duty to God and his king. He does what he must do, not what pleases him.' He felt the anger and outrage building in him. ‘God’s truth, boy, what kind of world would this be if every man did what pleased him alone? Who would plough the fields and reap the harvest, if every man had the right to say, "I don’t want to do that." In this world there is a place for every man, but every man must know his place.'"

"The branch breaks that will not bend with the wind. You must learn to bend."

"Duplicity thy name is woman!"

"We are all mere insects caught in the web that the gods spin for us."

"The most effective way to kill any animal is for it to die before it even knows you are there."

"I've eaten lion, leopard, crocodile, python. I don't recommend lion. It tastes exactly like when a tomcat comes into your house and sprays."

"It's a melancholy and moving thing to hunt an elephant. It's like shooting an old man."

"They say if you drink Zambezi water with your mother's milk, you are always a slave of Africa, and I am."

"In a profound sense every man has two halves to his being: he is not one person so much as two persons trying to act in unison. I believe that in the heart of each human being there is something which I can only describe as a "child of darkness" who is equal and complementary to the more obvious "child of light." Whether we know it or not we all have within us a natural instinctive man, a dark brother, to whom we are irrevocably joined as to our own shadow. However much our conscious reason may reject him, he is there for good or ill, clamouring for recognition and awareness and a fair share of life just as the less conscious black man of Africa is struggling and clamouring for life, light and honour in our societies. I need not emphasize how the rational, calculating, acutely reasoning and determined human being that Western man has made of himself has increasingly considered this side of himself not as a brother but as an enemy, capable, with his upsurges of rich emotion and colourful impulses, of wrecking conscious man's carefully planned and closely reasoned way of existence."

"We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place."

"Men are never alone because that which, acknowledged or unacknowledged, dreams through them is always by their side."

"It is the not-yet in the now, The taste of fruit that does not-yet exist Hanging the blossom on the bough."

"Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril."

"There is a way in which the collective knowledge of mankind expresses itself, for the finite individual, through mere daily living: a way in which life itself is sheer knowing."

"Africa has always walked in my mind proudly upright, an African giant among the other continents, toes well dug into the final ocean of one hemisphere, rising to its full height in the graying skies of the other; head and shoulders broad, square and enduring, making light of the bagful of blue Mediterranean slung over its back as it marches patiently through time."

"Of all man's inborn dispositions there is none more heroic than the love in him. Everything else accepts defeat and dies, but love will fight no-love every inch of the way."

"The buffalo's powerful head darkening the yellow grass, like the lion's imperative roar and the elephant's long, somnambulistic stride, has more of the quintessential Africa in it for me than any other manifestation of all the scores of animals that I know and love."

"This is the story of a journey in a great wasteland and a search for some pure remnant of the unique and almost vanished First People of my native land, the Bushmen of Africa."

"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right."

"By chance (to use the only phrase we have for describing one of the most significant manifestations of life)."

"The spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird."

"The educating of the parents is really the education of the child: children tend to live what is unlived in the parents, so it is vital that parents should be aware of their inferior, their dark side, and should press on getting to know themselves."

"What is most threatening and destructive in human society today is the human being who is split in his own nucleus: it is the fission in the modern soul which makes nuclear fission so dangerous — he is a split atom. He has got to heal himself, make himself whole."

"Somehow we should learn to know that our problems are our most precious possessions. They are the raw materials of our salvation: no problem — no redemption."

"The man of the Kalahari is Esau and we are Jacob, and there is a great gulf between us. This sense of property, of possession that we have is utterly foreign to the Esaus of the world. We have, he is."