Quotes from Alexandra Fuller

Toasted tobacco, no additives,' I said. 'Yum. Tastes like childhood.

This is the Tree of Forgetfulness. All the headmen here plant one of these trees in the village. They say ancestors stay inside it. If there is some sickness or if you are troubled by spirits, then you sit under the Tree of Forgetfulness and your ancestors will assist you with whatever is wrong'.

truthfully we were alone only in the ways Westerners speak of being alone in Africa, as if the few hundred locals by whom they are almost always surrounded are part of the landscape, instead of part of humanity.

There is a madman who lives on the road to Mkushi. Every full moon he comes out onto the tarmac and digs a deep trench across the road. Dad would like to find the madman and bring him back to the farm. 'Think what a strong bugger he is, eh?' 'Yes, but you could only get him to work when there was a full moon.' 'Which is twice as hard as any other Zambian.

The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and vulnerable; their doors are flimsy pieces of plyboard or sacks hanging and lank. Children and chickens and dogs scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive through their open, eroding lives.

Time was the first thing I noticed about the United States.

Stand unshod upon it for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator," Alan Paton wrote. "Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed."4

among his very few belongings I found a small, green leather-bound booklet given "to Timothy Donald Fuller with the Compliments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a memento on becoming a citizen of Rhodesia at Umtali on 17th October, 1974." Inside the pamphlet were a few of the sorts of things meant to inspire Rhodesian citizens onward and upward to greater things. A statue of Cecil John Rhodes, looking gouty; that was page 1.

For the first time, I was beginning to see that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable, unapologetic way, she must first possess it.

They drink blood, he tells me. Who? Leopards. Why? For fun. Leopard beer. He laughs.

How much strength must one people have? And for how long must they have it?

Dad says, At least death by mercenary is quicker. Than what? Death by aid.

We drink the barely cool locally brewed Mosi from the leaky mildew-smelling fridge, keeping an eye out for UFOs, unidentified floating objects, in the bottles.

So happy to be home I feel as if I'm swimming in syrup.

At morning assembly we were read the words of Cyprian of Carthage: 'Let us on both sides of death always pray for one another.' Then we bowed our heads and beseeched God to protect our troops, and to send us peace and plentiful rain, and to grant us an ample harvest. But God remained pretty meager with his miracles: the dead stayed dead, the war went on, the rain either came too early and too strong or not at all, and the harvest depended in whether or not we'd had eelworm and blight.

She is gently manic, in a pottering sort of way.

It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.

The two of us lurching on an unlikely journey up a lonely road in the dark, thick beginning of a Mozambique night. As our pickup churned over rocks and through thick sand, the engine drowned out the night cries of the cicadas, the crickets, and the nightjars. Behind us, a plume of dust burned pink in our rear lights.

The only people who think war is a glorious game are the bloody fools who've never had to be on the pointy end of it.

The world looks better when your belly is full, brighter and more hopeful. After

the odd small goat, surprised by so much unaccustomed water, died from disgust.

but of course any time we become something other than ourselves, it is just death by another name.

The people who exhaust themselves are the ones who run around the base of the mountain shrieking that theirs is the only real, proper way to the top.

Each daughter experiences her father's death as if she were the only daughter on Earth, and he the only father.