"I am the middle one, the girl, and my little brother clung against my stomach with his arms round my neck and his legs round my waist like a baby monkey to its mother."

"This old friend of Adah's paid for the taxi that took her home from Camden Town because he thought she was still with her husband."

"(Chapter Two)"

"There is nothing. No home”"

"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."

"“I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow. But I have the same fears as people who do take these precautions, and my windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wine glass."

""It was not possible to insure the house, the swimming pool or the car against riot damage. There were riots, but these were outside the city, where people of another color were quartered. These people were not allowed into the suburb except as reliable housemaids and gardeners, so there was nothing to fear, the husband told the wife. Yet she was afraid that some day such people might come up the street and tear off the plaque YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and open the gates and stream in... Nonsense, my dear, said the husband, there are police and soldiers and tear-gas and guns to keep them away."

"the trusted housemaid said these were loafers and tsotsis, who would come and tie and shut her in a cupboard."

"The man and his wife, talking of the latest armed robbery in the suburb, were distracted by the sight of the little boy's pet cat effortlessly arriving over the seven-foot wall, descending first with a rapid bracing of extended forepaws down on the sheer vertical surface, and then a graceful launch, landing with swishing tail within the property.""

"A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried by one foot after another along a wooden floor. I listened. I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration."

""...a loss made keener by the property owner's knowledge that the thieves wouldn't even have been able to appreciate what it was they were drinking."

"I reply that I don’t write children’s stories; and he writes back that at a recent congress/book fair/seminar a certain novelist said every writer ought to write at least one story for children. I think of sending a postcard saying I don’t accept that I ‘ought’ to write anything."

"When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for a walk round the neighborhood streets they no longer paused to admire this show of roses or that perfect lawn; these were hidden behind an array of different varieties of security fences, walls and devices."

"before he was knifed by a casual labourer he had dismissed without pay."

"people of another colour,” as the narrator calls them, are rioting in the townships outside the city ."

"pure concentration camp style."

"We were tired, so tired. My first-born brother and the man had to lift our grandfather from stone to stone where we found places to cross the rivers. Our grandmother is strong but her feet were bleeding. We could not carry the basket on our head any longer, we couldn't carry anything except my little brother. We left our things under a bush. As long as our bodies get there, our grandmother said.""

"(Chapter 1, Page 3)"

"The curtains are open upon the dark, at night. When he gets up in the morning he closes them. By now they are on fire with the sun. The day pressing to enter. But his back is turned; he is an echo in the chamber of what was once the hotel.""

"bleeding mass of the boy into the house"

"And it was true that from that day on the cat slept in the little boy's bed and kept to the garden, never risking a try at breaching security."

"They had smashed his camera and locked him up like a black and he hated them and their government and everything they might do, whether it was good or bad."

"He is not listening: the swell and clash, the tympani of conflict, the brass of glory, the chords of thrilling resolve, the maudlin strings of regret, the pauses of disgust—they come from inside him."

"The boy would perhaps become an accountant, certainly something one rung above his father, because each generation must better itself, as they had done by emigrating."

"He could not say to this woman, That’s not what I read."

"A house and a car. Eventually some sort of decent position. Rehabilitated."

"Sometimes he found himself swimming underwater beneath them, his tough-skinned body grazing past like a shark."

"And so when we left we had among us only a child here and there who was raw-faced and blue-eyed; we were coloured neither very dark nor very light ."

"A mother and father must never make any move that might jeopardize the opportunities they themselves have not been able to provide."

"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."

"So the whole thing was a complete waste, even more of a waste for the poor devils than I thought it would be”"

"We should have never allowed it. Giving in, letting you run wild with those boys. It started to go wrong then, we should have seen you were going to make a mess of our lives, I don’t know why. You had to go jumping from up there. Do you know what I felt, seeing you fall like that, enjoying yourself frightening us to death while you fooled around with killing yourself? We should have known it. Where it would end. Why did you have to be like that? Why? Why?"

"Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming.”"

"Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.”"

"the baas is seeing to it for you”"

"feudal. Wrong, I suppose, obsolete, but more comfortable all around"

"And when I flared up and told [the police] that so long as my natives did their work, I didn’t think it my right or concern to poke my nose into their private lives, I got from the coarse, dull-witted police sergeant one of those looks that come not from any thinking process going on in the brain but from that faculty common to all who are possessed by the master-race theory—a look of insanely inane certainty. He grinned at me with a mixture of scorn and delight at my stupidity"

"at the waste, the uselessness of this sacrifice by people so poor. Just like the poor everywhere, I thought, who stint themselves the decencies of life in order to ensure themselves the decencies of death”"

"to change something in [themselves]"

"Why did the State call witnesses who came right out and said the regime oppressed their spirits and frustrated their normal ambitions?"

"You seem to know so much. As if you'd"

"Two years ago I just felt I wanted to come back. I couldn't give myself a real reason. I've been doing the same sort of work here — actually, I ran a course at the business school of a university, this year—and I'm slowly beginning to find out I wanted to. To come back. It seems it's something to do with things like this."

"I had the feeling that they were shocked, in a laconic fashion, by their own mistake, but that in the confusion of their anonymous dead they were helpless to put it right”"

"Lawyers work like that... I've noticed. The first few days, it's a matter of people trying each to confuse the other side.'"

"Sometimes don't you find an old friend becomes something else. Just for a little while,as of a face is turned to another angle ? And next day it's the same old one again. Nothing's changed."

"What a session! I don't know... After two hours ofthat... feel like I'm caught in a roll of sticky tape... unreal...'"

"Friends are important for you , aren't they? I mean everybody has friends ,but you. You'd really do anything for your friends. Wouldn't you?"

"I imagine all this sounds rather feeble to you. I don't suppose you're someone who stands on the sidelines.'"