Andre Brink Quotes

#1. In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.

John Ruskin

#2. As a Jew, I had no desire to challenge my childhood prejudice. But as a teacher, I could not do otherwise.

Sondra Perl

#3. A country can't love you. At most it may need you. It's much the same as people.

Andre Brink

#4. When the conspiracy of lies surrounding me demands of me to silence the one word of truth given to me, that word becomes the one word I wish to utter above all others.

Andre Brink

#5. He caught sight of Dwalin's green hood hanging up. He hung his red one next to it, and Balin at your service!

J.R.R. Tolkien

#6. I was born on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in the early spring of 1960.

Andre Brink

#7. If I speak with a character's voice it is because that character's become so much part of me that ... I think I have the right then to imagine myself into the skin, into the life, into the dreams, into the experience of the particular character that I've chosen.

Andre Brink

#8. Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew nothing about it.

Andre Brink

#9. Sometimes, in one of his more exuberant or desperate moods, Pa would go out in the veld and sprinkle brandy on the daisies to make them drunk so that they wouldn't feel the pain of shrivelling up and dying.

Andre Brink

#10. In love, no question is ever preposterous.

Andre Brink

#11. My library was
all libraries are
a place of ultimate refuge, a wild and sacred space where meanings are manageable precisely because they aren't binding; and where illusion is comfortingly real.

Andre Brink

#12. We were both satellites orbiting Denny's sun, struggling for gravitational supremacy. Of course, she had the advantage of her tongue and her thumbs, and when I watched her kiss and fondle him sometimes she would glance at me and wink as if to gloat: Look at my thumbs! See what they can do!

Garth Stein

#13. But for Mozart love is only the litmus test. To determine whether one is truly free or not.

Andre Brink

#14. To respect the dignity of a relationship also implies accepting the end when it comes. Except in my mind, except in my dreams, where the aftertaste of her still lingers.

Andre Brink

#15. I grew up in a house with a mother who was a teacher and a Freedom Rider - very left-wing Democrats living in a heterogeneous working-class neighborhood. I picked up a lot of those values there, and I brought them with me when I showed up in Hollywood.

Ben Affleck

#16. I've made a poster at home. You know the iconic image of Che Guevara, the black and red graphic of his face? I think it's the perfect graphic, the best graphic ever made. I cut a Concorde out and put it over his head so it's Che looking up and the Concorde going by. Both are dead, maybe obsolete.

Aleksandra Mir

#17. As Alan Paton said, 'Ah but your fucking land is beautiful'.

Andre Brink

#18. I thought I was over you. But then I was under you. And now I'm in love with you.

Tiffany Reisz