Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I listen mostly to classical music.
I had the constitution of a missionary.
In general, I almost always watch foreign films.
The belief that we can be done with our past is a myth.
I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her.
Marriage is the trickiest and most basic contract that we have.
You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.
In Africa, we filled up all available time busily doing not much, and then we wasted the rest.
I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.
It's probably cliche to say this, but in my experience, people are far more alike than they are dissimilar.
That's the advantage of being a writer: No matter what happens, as long as you survive it, it goes into the work.
I adore my family. I don't love their politics. I think they're wonderful parents. They were dreadful at parenting.
In ways I don't entirely have the words for an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.
In ways I don't entirely have the words for, an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.
It is the perpetual tragedy of all families: each of us believe our congenital pathologies and singular pains end with us.
This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it.
Everyone says marriage is hard work, but they don't tell you that actually being yourself and respecting yourself is hard work.
I write and I read, and I write and read my way into and out of ideas and life. And that's what we do. That's what storytellers do.
You can have an intense connection to someone without being a good, lifelong mate for him. Love is complicated and difficult that way.
The most basic human impulse is toward entropy and laziness. The less we have to do to grow spiritually, the more likely we are to do it.
In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy.
Being a white southern African who saw the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, the sense of being an outsider was absolutely instilled in my limbic system.
Retaining culture takes effort and persistence and discipline. It's a commitment, not a flag. You can't just pull it out and wave it about when it's convenient.
I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.
How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.
It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.
I look around and pay attention to what around me is not being talked about, and then I talk about it with as much humour and honesty as I can. All my books have been that way.
The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty.
For a memoir to really succeed, the author has to do such hard work before they come to the page. They have to do a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.
What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.
I did not know that for the things that unhorse you, for the things that wreck you, for the things that toy with your internal tide - against those things, there is no conventional guard.
I want to make words out of life. That's bigger than me. That's as big a creative force as - bigger than, for me, even having children. That felt more accidental - wonderful, but accidental.
I think there's a big difference between loving someone out of duty and dependency and loving someone because you really are able to sort of grow and be whole in the context of that relationship.
Surely until all of us own and honor one another's dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace.
Oh, I don't keep a journal. How you remember an incident is dictated by your emotional state at the time. How you receive the information that is coming in is definitely based on your history and who you are.
I think for writers, I think it's really important to court eviction from your tribe: to expose things and to wake people up. And so I think that that can feel like a violation to the people you love the most.
Yes, as an oppressed people, American Indians have this epic burden, but first and foremost, they're human: sometimes a mess, sometimes funny or sad, at times very wise, and other times not wise at all - a lot like me.
I'm unconventional and eccentric and talk things out, and it seemed that the person I married - maybe in reaction - got quieter and more conventional over time. It felt as if we were putting each other in a straitjacket.
There is no way to order chaos. It's the fundamental theory at the beginning and end of everything; it's the ultimate law of nature. There's no way to win against unpredictability, to suit up completely against accidents.
There are real consequences when women speak out. It's really dangerous, and it takes real courage. We are still speaking out against a white male majority. Forget the glass ceiling. We haven't even broken the glass floor!
There aren't enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don't do it for the money or because they want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breathe or eat or love.
The rains are rhythmic, coming religiously in the afternoons (after lunch has been eaten but before tea, so that the nights are washed clean-black with bright pinpoints of silver starlight hanging over a restless, grateful earth).
But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself -- maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow.
There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.
It seems very clear to me that we, in the West, cannot afford to continue assuming propriety over the world's resources in a careless, greedy way without paying for it - not only with the lives of our loved ones, but also with our souls.
I'm a working writer; this is my job. So it matters to me that it's good. I sweat over every word. I don't just vomit this stuff up. It's agony. The only thing that comes close is childbirth, except it's like being in labor for eighteen months.
I remember Karoi as a very hot, flat place, but in reality, it is all hills. We just lived next to an airstrip - the only flat piece of land around. That was my world as a three-year-old and sums up the indelible power of memory to a young child.
For me, writing is really an agony. I feel as if I have a huge, luminous idea that has the potential to be really profound, and then when I set it down on paper, I find the power of the idea has been hugely weakened in the process of transmission.
The only process that comes close to the process of writing a whole book, in my experience, is childbirth. There is this moment when you think you can't possibly labour for another moment, and that, paradoxically, is when you have to push hardest.
You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.