"the Theory of Other Worlds. Simply put, it said that when knowledge or power went out of this world it did two things: first, it created another place; and second, it left a hole, a door between this world where it had once existed and the new place it had made."

"Several times Waves passed over our heads, but they fell back the next instant. We were drenched, we were numbed, we were blinded, we were deafened; but always we were saved."

"Suddenly I saw in front of me the Statue of the Faun, the Statue that I love above all others. There was his calm, faintly smiling face; there was his forefinger gently pressed to his lips. [...] Hush! he told me. Be comforted!"

"The truth is a strange thing. It is often hidden in plain sight, but we are blind to it."

"There are many truths in the world, and they are not always compatible."

"The world is not what it seems. It is a reflection of our own minds."

"I am not sure who I am. I am not sure if I have always been here, or if I have come from somewhere else."

"The world is a beautiful place, even in its darkness."

"I have a very bad memory, and I am often confused about what is real and what is not."

"The only way to escape from the world is to create our own."

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

"Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship."

"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."

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

"Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship."

"Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back."

"I am the only person who has ever tried to make a map of the entire world. It is a very difficult task, as the world is very large, and very strange."

"Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church."

"There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice."

"The world is a series of rooms, and there is no end to them."

"The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it."

"Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb."

"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."

"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."

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

"They looked different there—you should have seen the clothes in their cupboard. And the glasses—for visitors, when they drink wine. Here they haven’t got anything—just like us."

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

"White people. They are very powerful, my son. They are very clever. You will never come to the end of the things they can do."

"People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped."

"(Chapter 4)"

"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.."

"White people must have their own people somewhere. Aren’t they living everywhere in the world…Don’t they go anywhere they want to go? They’ve got money."

"If I offended you, if I hurt your dignity, if what I thought was my friendliness, the feeling I had for you--if that hurt your feelings... I know I didn't know and I should have known."

"In the morning he had a moment of hallucinatory horror when he saw the blood of the pig on his penis--then understood it was hers."

"Bam and Maureen had longed for cigarettes, for a drink of wine or spirits, their children had craved for sweet things; but in the days of rain, the small fire they never let die satisfied all wants."

"The chief had the sharp, impatient, skeptical voice of a man quicker than the people he keeps around him, but knew no white man's language. Why should he? It was not for him to work as a servant or go down the mines."

"It was early morning but in their hut the women were dreamy, as at the end of the day... Perhaps they had been out since first light gathering wood or working in their fields--Maureen was aware, among them in the hut, of not knowing where she was, in time, in the order of a day as she had always known it."

"White people here! Didn't you tell us many times how they live, there. A room to sleep in, another room to eat in, another room to sit in, a room with books..."

"The mists of the night left a vivid freshness that dispels the sickly ammoniacal odour of fowl droppings, the fetid cloying of old thatch, the stinks of rotting garbage--rags, the jaw-bone of a calf, scaly with big glistening flies--that collect wherever the rains have hollowed the ground between huts."

"But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it was pressed in upon her and filled her as someone's breath fills a balloon's shape. She was already not what she was."

"You don't have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense -- there's a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers."

"To keep anything the way you like it for yourself you have to have the stomach to ignore -- dead and hidden -- whatever intrudes. Those for whom life is cheapest recognise that."

"He rolls onto his side, where he has the impression the reeds facing him hide him as drawn curtains keep out day. The sense of familiarity, of some kind of unwelcome knowledge or knowing, is slow to ebb. As it does, it leaves space in his mind; or uncovers, like the retreat of a high tide, carrying away silt."

"He would no sooner shoot a buck than a man; and he did not keep any revolver under his pillow to defend his wife, his children or his property in their suburban house."

"For the twentieth, the hundredth time, since the pass-burnings of the Fifties, since Sharpeville, since Soweto '76 since Elsie's River 1980, it seemed that all was quieting down."

"White people here! Didn’t you tell us many times how they live there…Now you tell me nowhere."

"A farm is not beautiful unless it is productive. Reasonable productivity prevailed; he had to keep half an eye (all he could spare) on everything, all the time, to achieve even that much, and of course he had made it his business to pick up a working knowledge of husbandry, animal and crop, so that he couldn't easily be hoodwinked by his people there and could plan farming operations with some authority."

"‘"I was born into a musical family, musicians to whom I was bonded either by blood or by a musical brotherhood. I have been dazzled by lyrics that make hearts flutter, by piano solos that seem to hang in the air deep into the night, long after the performances were concluded."

"When I stand at assembly to address them regarding sporting events. The girls fanning themselves with their hands as if I’ve suddenly turned up the sun’s temperature – some fake fainting, their friends standing behind them to catch them as they fake fall."

"I have thought about the many faces you wear in a lifetime. For, even if it’s a known face, with improvements and deformities it might encounter in its life journey, it is not the same face, not the same expressions mark such a face, for faces have mastered countless masks and counter masks, pointed revelations in front of prosecutors, clergymen, rivals, would- be assassins, former lovers, sexual superiors, law-enforcers, photographers, admired grandparents or the babbling babies of strangers."