Top 43 Alexandra Fuller Quotes
#1. The problem with most people," Dad said once, not necessarily implying that I counted as most people, but not discounting the possibility either, "is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live.
Alexandra Fuller
#2. What did I know about the fifty-five (give or take) countries of Africa? I carried within me one deep personal thread of one small part of it, and it had changed and colored everything,
Alexandra Fuller
#3. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#5. But the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy.
Alexandra Fuller
#6. It is the deep-black-sky quiet time of night, which is the halfway time between the sun setting and the sun rising when even the night animals are quiet - as if they, like day animals, take a break in the middle of their work to rest.
Alexandra Fuller
#9. I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look Africa; and yet here I still was.
Alexandra Fuller
#10. FBI Girl is a gorgeous, sumptuous book. Conlon-McIvor takes a subject (herself and her family) that might have sunk in other hands, beats egg white under her words and the whole thing rises like a dream. It's a love story for her people and for a time and place. Read it.
Alexandra Fuller
#12. You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn't. You know how it is. You have to leave before the rains come, or it's too late.
Alexandra Fuller
#13. To say someone has lost her mind does not do justice to what madness looks like. It's not as if a person's mind rolls out of her head, lodges under the carpet or between the cracks of the sofa, and is therefore retrievable by some logical search.
Alexandra Fuller
#14. This is the Tree of Forgetfulness. All the headmen here plant one of these trees in the village. They say ancestors stay inside it. If there is some sickness or if you are troubled by spirits, then you sit under the Tree of Forgetfulness and your ancestors will assist you with whatever is wrong'.
Alexandra Fuller
#15. Well-bred' ensured buckled noses, high-arched feet, a predisposition to madness, and ... an innate belief in our own unquestioning superiority.
Alexandra Fuller
#16. But deep down I always knew 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#17. Truthfully we were alone only in the ways Westerners speak of being alone in Africa, as if the few hundred locals by whom they are almost always surrounded are part of the landscape, instead of part of humanity.
Alexandra Fuller
#19. 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).
Alexandra Fuller
#20. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#21. I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.
Alexandra Fuller
#22. As soon as we mistake our ease for our security, our conveniences for our human rights, our luxuries for our entitlements, we aren't culturally distinct anymore. Then we're part of someone else's corporate plan, we're a predictable, fulfilled expectation; we're a black dot on a bottom line.
Alexandra Fuller
#23. Toasted tobacco, no additives,' I said. 'Yum. Tastes like childhood.
Alexandra Fuller
#24. Because of all the kinds of love there are out there - romantic, passionate, parental, spousal, brotherly - the love that is touted as most unassailable, complicit, and colluding is the love between sisters.
Alexandra Fuller
#25. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#26. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#27. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#28. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#29. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#30. The only people who think war is a glorious game are the bloody fools who've never had to be on the pointy end of it.
Alexandra Fuller
#31. You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you'd never, ever stop grieving.
Alexandra Fuller
#32. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#33. This is not a full circle. It's Life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we all make to get on with it.
Alexandra Fuller
#34. She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night.
Alexandra Fuller
#35. Bloody dogs," Dad said, kicking indiscriminately under the table. He put his revolver next to his side-plate. Mum put her Uzi on an empty chair beside her. "Safety on?" Dad always asked. "Those things are liable to go off at the touch of a gnat's testicle.
Alexandra Fuller
#36. The world looks better when your belly is full, brighter and more hopeful. After
Alexandra Fuller
#37. The odd small goat, surprised by so much unaccustomed water, died from disgust.
Alexandra Fuller
#38. It should not be physically possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible.
Alexandra Fuller
#39. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#41. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#42. 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.
Alexandra Fuller
#43. All of us are mad and then she adds,smiling, but I'm the only one with a certificate to prove it
Alexandra Fuller
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