Women Authors From South Africa

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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"

"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."

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

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

"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.""

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"The year ended in a roar of pain."

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

"'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."

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

"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."

"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?"

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

"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'."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The man really [is] a child."

"Hannetjie is just a child and stupidly truthful."

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

"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."

"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."

"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?’"

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

"...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."

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

"“Democrat Grover Cleveland was America’s last conservative president. He preached and practiced the maxim that ‘the people must support the government, but the government must not support the people.'”"

"Voluntary exchanges are by definition advantageous to their participants. Within this voluntary, mutually beneficial relationship, I give up an item I value less, for something I value more: a fee for the desired product or service. My trading partners, whose valuations are in complementary opposition to mine, reciprocate in kind. Ceteris paribus (all other things being equal), there's nothing wrong with my running a trade deficit with Costco, my hair stylist or my GTI dealer, as I do—just as long as I pay for my purchases. However, the data demonstrate that Americans, in general, are not paying for their purchases."

"I don't know that Trump favors protective tariffs, import quotas or export subsidies. I do know that we don't have free trade. What goes for 'free trade' is trade managed by powerful bureaucracies—national and transnational international—central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds do as they please. My understanding is that Trump simply wants to make these agreements and organs work for the American people."