Quotes from Damon Galgut

Something is wrong with him. You mark my words. He's a wild donkey of

Highveld sky. The farm, which is what they call it

My father's tongue, forever foreign to me.

Her own voice sounds echoey, as if somebody else is speaking.

Thunder in the distance, like a crowd shouting in a foreign language.

And what about you? he asks Anton. What's happened since we last met? Oh, it's been good. What did you study? Never got there, actually. Had a few years of wandering around, then I settled down. Married my childhood sweetheart and been running the family famr ever since. Listens to himself with amazement. All of it true, all false.

Pero no hay rendición de cuentas. Para cada uno de nosotros la muerte es el último día.

Goldie was a believer in the imperial project, which is to say, in the civilising power of social progress.

The Indians were inside their bodies, he decided, in a way that the British were not. His own flesh impeded his spirit.

he is incapable of examining his own pain like a spore on a slide and finding it interesting, interesting. If your own pain is interesting to yo, how much more detached will you be from somebody else's pain...

Children still, on the verge of not being children any more.

The zero point of death has begun to shrink behind them, nobody can live with intense emotions for very long, it's too exhausting, and everything that can be described can also be made harmless.

Give him a taboo and he feels the need to break it.

Fire and water and smoke and incense and chanting and bells and butter and blood: this was a language whose syllables were translated into physical terms; a language of the elements. It was a language that he hoped might speak to him one day.

He laughs with wise, percolated mirth

You have to make them look peaceful. That's what the family wants to see, that their loved one is at peace.

Amor is thirteen years old, history has not yet trod on her.

Muchos de los vivos también se ven borrosos y a la deriva, no es un defecto exclusivo de los difuntos.