Quotes from Giles Foden

If you laugh at it, you're stepping over the corpses. And if you work with him, well, it's worse.

It is the bad spirit that has come over this place. My grandmother says that it will only go away when you see a dog and a goat riding a bicycle together.

I have a sensation of losing track of time. In front of me, the mountain floats up with the swell. Drifts away amid tendrils of mist. And then comes back into sight.

I was also feeding off a more general depression that sometimes settled over Kampala evenings. You had a sense of people not having gotten what they wanted during the day. The street vendors, for instance

there is a tendency in Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans. Had Amin been white, free Africa would have passed many resolutions condemning him. Being black is now

They're more fun outside your head than in, Campbell.

information is perishable, lasting no longer than the structure to which it refers, just as the bathwater I was sitting in as I recalled all this would no longer be my bathwater once it ran down the plughole.

you just can't use averages to predict the specifics of the next generation of eddies, any more than you could use an average to predict the life-story of an individual human being.

It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values—the permanence of memory. —JOSEPH CONRAD

a gigantic phantom rose suddenly out of the sea. I started backwards from a tall figure projected against a wall of ice. The wall was an iceberg—and the phantom, I slowly realised, was my own reflection, enormously enlarged.

There again, the acceleration of history is the job of ruthless men.

But friction is mostly a negative force, socially speaking. It reduces efficiency." "Yes, but that negativity prevents bad plans as much as good ones. That

It is terrible the way you think time is going to change you. The way you think of some future time when things will be all right. And all that happens is that you drop back into the previous stream of time and it closes over your head.

I've come to this conclusion, on the rustling of the dried leaf skirts. It's like a form of vagueness that lets you imagine things, only you hear it.

Ryman himself said—all mistakes proceed from initial conditions.

The young can be so unreasonable in what they expect from

The process of measurement must have a beginning and end. The establishment of those points has an effect on the outcome.

Scotland might as well be a foreign country to one such as myself. But then I often felt like that in England, too, as did many of us who had grown up in the colonies. It was as if we had returned to a home different from the one we had been holding in our heads all that time.

Only then do I feel cleansed and full of vitality: the voice of the sea, the amniotic rock of it, the burst of salt air in the lungs, they can do this to you. As if the old soul, the bad soul, had been changed into little water drops and fallen into the ocean, never to be found.

In any culture, if information is to maximise in a contextual space, and new meanings be born, the original story has to have substance - there's gotta be gold in them thar hills.

An important book for our times, in which one woman's determination and refusal to consent sets an example of courage and honesty.

I can't think of a specific meal, but my favourite country for food has got to be France. I love those restaurants in the middle of the village squares.