novelists-from-south-africa

"Men are never alone because that which, acknowledged or unacknowledged, dreams through them is always by their side."

"Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril."

"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."

"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."

"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"By chance (to use the only phrase we have for describing one of the most significant manifestations of life)."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It is the not-yet in the now, The taste of fruit that does not-yet exist Hanging the blossom on the bough."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The most effective way to kill any animal is for it to die before it even knows you are there."

"Duplicity thy name is woman!"

"It's a melancholy and moving thing to hunt an elephant. It's like shooting an old man."

"The branch breaks that will not bend with the wind. You must learn to bend."

"We are all mere insects caught in the web that the gods spin for us."

"They say if you drink Zambezi water with your mother's milk, you are always a slave of Africa, and I am."

"No profit was too small to despise; no loss was too small to abhor."

"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."

"War is the game played by old men with the lives of the young."

"History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead."

"'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.'"

"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."

"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."

"Should five slaves dictate to a king? If five baboons bark, must the black-maned lion tremble?"

"They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy — just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it."

"Robin Hood was also a terrorist ― but he had some style and a little class."

"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."

"Something always dies when the lion feeds — and yet there is meat for those that follow him."

"Beware of your most implacable enemy — yourself."

"It's an old chestnut, but those set to guard a treasure, are too often those who loot it."

"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"

"fiction projects today’s reality into the future much better than nonfiction"

"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"

"We have yet to formulate or to forge a common identity that says “South Africa""

"We’re a country that is trying to find itself as a nation. We are not a nation"

"If you were a foreigner coming to South Africa, and you read the books, you will think black people do not exist"

"Writing a novel is like running a marathon"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"