Peter Abrahams Quotes

#1. There is a qualitative difference between being a minority and being a majority. Majorities are stronger under psychological pressure because numbers count. But only if they are aware of it.

Peter Abrahams

#2. My mother went to work in the homes of white folk, usually living in and looking after their children. The money was small.

Peter Abrahams

#3. Must simplicity and humanity go under in the interest of progress? What is the most important component of civilization - is it human or mechanical? Must thought processes become involved and insincere? Must the class-struggle warp those who are involved in it?

Peter Abrahams

#4. We do not ask the right questions when we are young, so we miss the important answers. Now it is too late to ask, too late for the illuminating answers, and the unanswered questions haunt us for a lifetime.

Peter Abrahams

#5. Joseph and his mother come from the black kings who were before the white man.

Peter Abrahams

#6. They say life is all about connecting, like that's a good thing. But when brain and eyes are lining up you know different.

Peter Abrahams

#7. Positive social awareness among the South African educated half-caste is zero. Teaching is a mechanical job. The best way of earning a living.

Peter Abrahams

#8. I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.

Peter Abrahams

#9. To get where you want to go you can't only do what you like.

Peter Abrahams

#10. My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.

Peter Abrahams

#11. The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.

Peter Abrahams

#12. Marxism, communism, socialism - the ideologies - did not have the automatic answers to the problem of the relations between the lighter and darker races of mankind. They did not even have an answer to anti-Semitism.

Peter Abrahams

#13. Perhaps life had a meaning that transcended race and colour. If it had, I could not find it in South Africa.

Peter Abrahams

#14. Ingrid shrugged ... like Marie Antoinette hearing about the starving peasants.

Peter Abrahams

#15. To get from people you had to give a piece of yourself, a real piece that mattered.

Peter Abrahams

#16. You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer
history shows it's better if you're not
but you have to understand your badness.

Peter Abrahams

#17. To live with the conscious knowledge of the shadow of uncertainty, with the knowledge that disaster or tragedy could strike at any time; to be afraid and to know and acknowledge your fear, and still to live creatively and with unstinting love: that is to live with grace.

Peter Abrahams

#18. You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.

Peter Abrahams

#19. Many have changed so much that they have lost the magic of the dream that carried them on their own bootstraps.

Peter Abrahams

#20. All my life had been dominated by a sign, often invisible but no less real for that, which said: 'Reserved for Europeans Only.'

Peter Abrahams

#21. With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

Peter Abrahams

#22. Mom had the kind of love for her that you could feel, like it was part of the atmosphere

Peter Abrahams

#23. In the Caribbean islands, especially in Jamaica, have I found a country similar to South Africa plus the racial freedom I had sought so long.

Peter Abrahams

#24. In East, South and Central Africa, the minority manipulated the majority into believing the minority was the majority, that there were more whites in the world than blacks; instilled in the blacks a sense of inferiority, inadequacy, worthlessness.

Peter Abrahams

#25. The only places where I have found that simple human dignity, that respect for the other man, and the gracious feel of tolerance and humanity have not been either among the heroes of the class-struggle or the 'thinking men' but among my simple 'backward' people.

Peter Abrahams

#26. I don't want anything now, Sarie thought, not a thing in the world. I have everything I want. Yesterday I wanted so much without knowing what. Today I've got everything...

Peter Abrahams

#27. Tribal man is not an individual in the western sense. Psychologically and emotionally, he is the present living personification of a number of forces, among the most important of which are the ancestral dead.

Peter Abrahams

#28. The words dripped on my consciousness, sank into my being, and carried me away to the magic long ago of once upon a time.

Peter Abrahams

#29. The racism of the Nazis threatened to make whatever we had experienced look like child's play. If they could be so brutal to the Jews, what would they do to the blacks? So large numbers of black young men and women rallied to the defence of the empire.

Peter Abrahams

#30. What do you get out of hating people, out of having this bitterness in your heart always?

Peter Abrahams

#31. Most of the black women who lived in the lower end of Vrededorp came from the countryside and were there to be near their menfolk who worked in the mines. They spoke neither English nor Afrikaans.

Peter Abrahams