Quotes from Damon Galgut

Even in one's most physical moments, the real craving was for love.

No emotion was supposed to cross the great divide of class. Affection could erase all hierarchy; in this was the danger, and the delight.

That echo. It played in his head at unexpected moments, repeating certain sounds and making nonsense of them. But could you remember an echo? Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself.

aterriza allí donde una vez su espíritu tuvo cuerpo, pero ella, mujer de acuarela, ya no es sólida.

There was no reason why he should not lift the veil aside. Well, there was Lily. He could imagine his mother's face if he told her he was giving up meat and alcohol and going to live off the land and make sandals. Not to mention homogenic love. The veil might be thin, but in some cases it was insurmountable.

Åžöyle oluyor.

There are many monsters, oh, many!

This morning I met a woman with a golden nose. She was riding in a Cadillac with a monkey in her arms. Her driver stopped and she asked me, "Are you Fellini?" With this metallic voice she continued, "Why is it that in your movies, there is not even one normal person?" —FEDERICO FELLINI

Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you're moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border is a line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere.

showed him strangenesses in his own nature that partly alarmed him, but partly pleased him too – because they confirmed what he hoped about himself: that he did not belong, not quite, in the deadly properness around him. No, there was a whole aspect of his character that was an unmentioned half-brother to his civilised side: drunk and disorderly and primitive, closer to the woods than the city.

it) was like being under the sea, in aquamarine light. However bright or loud your surroundings, you were somehow always alone.

Her husband's foot touches hers, she pulls her foot away. Terrible to flinch from what you once, briefly, loved, or thought you did, or wanted to think you did. But are shackled to, regardless, for life.

His own sterility was apparent to him and would soon, he felt sure, be visible to others. Curiously, he didn't feel depressed at the prospect. He was almost intrigued by the idea of giving in to his oddness, turning into one of those remote, ineffectual creatures, so warped by their solitude that they became distasteful to normal people.

What did love mean if it was doled out so carelessly, with no thought of consequence?

On that lonely road they looked like mirror images of each other. Perhaps each of them thought of real communication as unnecessary, words divide by multiplying, what was certain was the oneness underneath the words. But now they refrain from talking because it might reveal to them how dangerously unlike one another they are. An image in a mirror is a reversal, the reflection and the original are joined but might cancel each other out.

But this is also one of the most compelling elements in travel, the feeling of dread underneath everything, it makes sensations heightened and acute, the world is charged with a power it doesn't have in ordinary life.

I'd like to accept this on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard, from the remarkable continent I'm part of. Please keep listening to us, there's a lot more to come.

A curious scene, this low-key festivity just a day after Ma has died, but on the other hand people have to eat, life goes on. They'll be drinking and making bawdy jokes soon after you go too.

Lives leak into each other, the past lays claim to the present

Interesting how the self can be split into segments, orgasm and observation at the same time, the eye that watches the I. Neither is me, but both might be.

He is wearing he same black pants from yesterday, but no shirt, his body is brown and hard, perfectly proportioned. He knows that he is beautiful and somehow his makes him ugly.

There was something humiliating, too, in a display of grief when the relationship had been unwitnessed. No, this was to be a private suffering, like lust or literature, lived out mostly in his dreams.

He didn't depend so much on the good opinion of others to feel complete. Nor did he expect happiness as his right any longer; he knew it was only for the strong.

But enough, we are the rainbow nation, which is to say it's a mixed and motley and mongrel assembly in the church today, restive and ill at ease, like antagonistic elements from the periodic table.