40 quotes found
"South Africa, renowned both far and wide For politics and little else beside."
"The City of Giraffes!—a People Who live between the earth and skies, Each in his lone religious steeple, Keeping a light-house with his eyes."
"Translations (like wives) are seldom strictly faithful if they are in the least attractive."
"I love to see, when leaves depart, The clear anatomy arrive, Winter, the paragon of art, That kills all forms of life and feeling Save what is pure and will survive."
"Our spirits leaped, hosannas of destruction, Like desert lilies forked with tongues of fire."
"The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss As intimate as love, as cold as death."
"The timeless, surly patience of the serf That moves the nearest to the naked earth And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers."
"We shall not meet again: over the wave Our ways divide, and yours is straight and endless – But mine is short and crooked to the grave: Yet what of these dark crowds, amid whose flow I battle like a rock, aloof and friendless – Are not their generations, vague and endless, The waves, the strides, the feet on which I go?"
"With white tails smoking free, Long streaming manes, and arching necks, they show Their kinship to their sisters of the sea – And forward hurl their thunderbolts of snow. Still out of hardships bred, Spirits of power and beauty and delight Have ever on such frugal pastures fed And loved to course with tempests through the night."
"Of all the clever people round me here I most delight in Me – Mine is the only voice I care to hear, And mine the only face I like to see."
"You praise the firm restraint with which they write – I'm with you there, of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where's the bloody horse?"
"He made enemies. He was held up as a Fascist by the poets of the Left but since they had already decreed that Plato was a Fascist, this too was something of a compliment. I once heard this wicked Fascist calmly recall that he had to leave South Africa because of the hostility he had aroused by seriously defending the cause of the Blacks in his writings...His reactions were those of a pastoral world in opposition to the industrial capital – the Tentacular City with its literary intrigues devised by the Intellect."
"Campbell has not any regulation political bias, I think. He may incline to Franco because he is a catholic, and to the Old Spain rather than the New Spain because he likes bullfights and all the romantic things. But of politics he has none, unless they are such as go with a great antipathy for the English "gentleman" in all his clubmanesque varieties; a great attachment to the back-Veldt of his native South Africa; and a constant desire to identify himself with the roughest and simplest of his fellow-creatures in pub, farm, and bullring. Such politics as go with those predilections and antipathies he has, but it would be difficult to give them a name. He certainly is neither a communist nor a fascist."
"Roy Campbell was an altogether more robust character, full of he-man postures, bronco-busting and similar exploits; a type which I usually rather suspect, but much in him was genuine."
"Roy Campbell was one of the very few great poets of our time. His poems are of great stature, and have a giant's strength and power of movement. They have, too, an extraordinary sensuous beauty. Everything is transformed to greatness."
"Here is a scion of an Ulster prot. family resident in S. Africa, most of whom fought in both wars, who became a Catholic after sheltering the Carmelite fathers in Barcelona — in vain, they were caught & butchered, and R.C. nearly lost his life. But he got the Carmelite archives from the burning library and took them through the Red country...However it is not possible to convey an impression of such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert. How unlike the Left – the 'corduroy panzers' who fled to America..."
"Words are such thin shavings of the fractal fruit, tiny scraping of the skin that holds these joyously determined swirls of history inside their juicy turbulence. Talking itself westward after the day's feast, each little word with its meaning strapped to its back falls down the swell of tomorrow like a hiker with hopeful new shoes."
"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."
"...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."