South African Author Quotes

Nadine Gordimer

Olive Schreiner

Breyten Breytenbach

Roy Campbell

Lauren Beukes

Lewis Nkosi

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Happiness is a hard thing because it is achieved only by making others happy.

What I do remember has never left my recall. On the other hand, what I have forgotten, I forgot with amazing swiftness: inside a week, and it was all gone. Moreover, it has remained safely tucked away. It doesn't haunt me. And for that, I am truly grateful.

It struck me that our history is contained in the home we live in, that we are shaped by the ability of these simple structures to resist being defiled

This wind you hear is the birth of memory
when the moment hatches in time's womb
there will be no art talk, the only poem
you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted
in the punctured marrow of the villain; the
timeless native son dancing like crazy to
the retrieved rhythms of desire
fading
in-
to
memory.

Keorapetse Kgositsile

Words are such thin shavings of the fractal fruit,
tiny scraping of the skin that holds
these joyously determined swirls of history
inside their juicy turbulence.
Talking itself westward after the day's feast,
each little word with its meaning strapped to its back
falls down the swell of tomorrow
like a hiker with hopeful new shoes.

Leaving traces of ourselves, as in creative productivity, could then be seen as part of the definition of consciousness for us as well. We know that in order to progress we must stretch for something just out of reach—if only for a life that will be more compassionate and decent than the cruelty, paranoia, greed, narrow corporatism, or narcissism we mostly indulge in and find such ample justification for. And so we dream.

Breyten Breytenbach

Map age genes place of origin
and love's lineaments. For mapped onto each body is love. Carthography of one's own country
or the contours of a foreign land

The Unbelievers like to explore various strategies in pursuit of happiness. Whereas Believers have a tendency of wanting to stay ignorant of the things that could make them unhappy, the Unbelievers like to induce sadness in order to attain happiness.

Or like a poet woo the Moon,
Riding an armchair for my steed,
And with a flashing pen harpoon
Terrific metaphors of speed.

If you're a writer, you can make the death of a canary stand for the whole mystery of death.

Nadine Gordimer

Caring. Not the most exciting of words, is it? Almost as humble as a tool. But that is the Alchemist's Stone of human endeavour.

If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.

People don't want novelty - they want the reassurance of familiarity. No-one wants to be challenged, no-one wants to have their minds blown. There is an insatiable appetite for affirmation.

One of the major barriers to productive thinking is the almost compulsive drive in most business organizations to be right.

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

Nothing an interested foreigner may have to say about the Soviet Union today can compare with the scorn and fury of those who inhabit the ruin of a dream.

Christopher Hope

You may well be right, and disaster may well come, I had told him. But for me it will always be a point of honour to go on working to prevent disaster, if only to make certain it is the right kind of disaster life needs when it does ultimately come.

Laurens van der Post

I have seen white settlers in Africa who had sworn that they would never sit down to table with those "smelly blacks" sit down quite happily with half-nude tribesmen once a country achieves independence. It is the context of power which changes behavior and transmutes antipathy into sympathy.

Dreams can be any size you want them to be. But the important thing is that you have one that is yours.

Martin Pistorius

I became an archaeologist because I wanted to drive around in a big Landrover; smoking, cursing and finding treasure.

Everything is important. To the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree, the deepest stone in the drift.

Marlene van Niekerk

Perpetrators who receive the gift of forgiveness are given a chance to change

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank,
history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly,
threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas
that is their life.
For, having primed it, they do not know where to start,
how to make a mark. They are alone in the world, a small new
island of whiteness. Or so they think; they do not know, or perhaps
they do not want to know, that the neighbourhood is full of people
like them. Thus they are steeped in its silence.

When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God's purposes in and through his people.

I know there will be spring, as surely as the birds know it when they see above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot fail us.

Olive Schreiner