Women Academics From South Africa

"Strong emotion - faith? - has different ways of being manifested among the different disciples within which people order their behaviour."

"For nearly thirty years the Communist Party allied itself as a legal organization with the African struggle for black rights and the extension of the franchise to the black majority."

"Flora pretended to cuddle me against the cold, but I didn't need her kind of emotional excitation. She talked about 'the girls' in there, and my mother was one of them."

"There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be."

"Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle. (First lines)"

"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.”"

"And for a moment I accept the triumph as I had managed it.”"

"The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical.”"

"Out in the country, even ten miles out, life is better than that."

"I should have given it up long ago if it had not been for her."

"Between its vandyke teeth, in the mouth opened in a roar too terrible to be heard, it had a black tongue."

"Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station."

"The train came out of the red horizon and bore down towards them over the single straight track."

"The young man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places. The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring. Pouring, pouring. She sat there, sick. A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp. She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.She sat there not wanting to move or speak, or to look at anything even; so that the mood should be associated with nothing, no object, word, or sight that might recur and so recall the feeling again….Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner.The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer."

"No one can say what it was the white soldier said over the telephone to his commanding officer, and if the commanding officer had told him what was going to be done, or whether the white soldier knew, as a matter of procedure laid down in his military training for this kind of war, what would be done. The police found the bicycle beneath his dangling shoes. So the family hanger-on still rides it; it would have been lost if it had been safe in the kitchen when the raid came. No one knows where the chief found a rope, in the ruins of the village."

"It's only on warm summer nights that the lions are restless. What they're seeing when they gaze during the day is nothing, their eyes are open but they don't see us -you can tell that when the lens of the pupil suddenlys shutters at the close swoop0 of one of the popcorn-begging pigeons through the bars of the cage. ... It's only on certain nights that their muscles flex and they begin to pant,their flanks heave as if they had been running through the dark night while other creatures shrank from their path, their jaws hang tense and wet as saliva flows as if in response to a scent of prey, at last they heave up their too-big heads, heavy, heavy heads, and out it comes. Out over the suburbs. A dreadful straining of the bowels to deliver itself; a groan that hangs above the houses in a low-lying cloud of smog and anguish."

"The zoo lions do no utter during the day. They yawn; wait for their ready-slaughtered kill to be tossed at them; keep their unused claws sheathed in huge harmless pads on which top-heavy, untidy heads rest,... gazing through lid-slats with what zoo visitors think of in sentimental prurience as yearning.Or once we were near the Baltic and the leviathan hooted from the night fog at sea. But would I dare to open my mouth now? Could I trust my breath to be sweet, these stale nights?"

"Wait for it; it will fall so quiet, hardly more than a faint roughness snagging the air in the ear's chambers. ... And begins once more. The panting reaches up up up down down down to that awe-ful groan!"

"Just before light, when it's supposed to be darkest, the body's at its lowest ebb and in the hospital on the hill old people die the night opens, a Black hole between stars, and from it comes a deep panting. Very distant and at once very close, right in the year, for the sound of breath is always intimate.It grows and gorws, a rising groan lifs out of the curved bars of the cage and hangs above the whole city -- And then it drops back, sinks away, becomes panting again."

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

"Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer nights. A tourist could be fooled. Africa already; at last, even though he went to bed in yet another metropole."

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

"Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it."

"There can be no global culture while there are inhabitants deprived of the ability to read, to have access to the powers of the imagination released through the written word, through literature; deprived of the intellectual and spiritual bounty of libraries."

"No globalisation without a human face."

"Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition."

"The question mark remains. It hangs over peace negotiations - that vital base for the answer an outsider who believes in justice surely must support: two fully independent states on agreed, realistic frontiers."

"There are two kinds of leaders in the species humankind. There is the man or woman of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman who creates a self out of response to people's needs, the call of conscience against oppression, injustice, and sufferings of any nature within our human condition. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other it is a charge of energy which comes in others needs and the demands these make on all of us who share humanity. Conscience is a form of solidarity."

"Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be."

"Dangers are relative, over time and distance; fear is relative, whether it menaces a multitude or a single life, but it always demands the same answers: a yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition, fear that eats the soul."

"Fear. It's unacknowledged; shared by friend and foe if nothing else is."

"time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate"

"Can there be the phenomenon of a world state of mind?"

"Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks."

"Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society."

"I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that."

"You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder."

"What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates."

"Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself."

"In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together."

"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."

"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."

"'Even the cat buries its dirt; I carry mine around with me.' She thought of saying it aloud many times in the weeks after she came home from the hospital."

"There was no mistaking her. She was a young woman whose cultivated gentleness of expression and shabby homespun style of dress, in the context in which she was encountered, suggested not transcendental meditation centre or environmental concern group or design studio, but a sign of identification with the humanity of those who had nothing and risked themselves."

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

"I think that as long as those of us in South Africa who are articulate are asked to go abroad, and we know we are going to be interviewed, we cannot refuse. There are so many people in South Africa, within the country, who are muzzled. And there are others who may not be muzzled within South Africa but whose passports are withdrawn, people like Bishop Desmond Tutu-a very important voice; you know, a writer is nothing compared with him. He is a big figure, a real leader, and he can't go abroad and speak. So I think that those of us who can, as long as we can, we have to use the opportunity."

"In countries like Czechoslovakia, like South Africa, like Argentina, guilt by association is a fact and therefore the friendships you form can be a political act. This circumstance, way of life, is very complex. People think that a political act is signing a declaration or planting a bomb, but there are all kinds of political acts in countries where there is a great political struggle going on."

"Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society…A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implication and he is politically committed. (1983)"

"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area."

"I think that the decision to be sincere is an artistic one."