Quotes from Alexandra Fuller

You watch," said Colton. "They most certainly will. Someone will mention it at my funeral. They'll say, 'We never should have made the poor boy do so much school. What a freakin' waste of his time it was.

it is the deep-black-sky quiet time of night, which is the halfway time between the sun setting and the sun rising when even the night animals are quiet—as if they, like day animals, take a break in the middle of their work to rest.

Motherhood—the way too many of us do it alone now—without an exaltation of female relatives, without a heft of knowing matrons to buoy us up, is unnatural.

But the truth is, most of the things that change the course of our lives happen in fleeting unguarded moments; grief buckling us at the knees; fear shattering through us like buckshot; love pulling us out on an unseen tide. And finding ourselves in the grip of these overpowering emotions, we then invent reasons based on the flimsy evidence we have accrued why they have happened, trying to make sense of the insensible with armloads of self-justification

And for the majority of the country, Freedom did not include access to the sidewalks, the best schools and hospitals, decent farming land or the right to vote. It now seems completely clear to me, looking back, that when a government talks about "fighting for Freedom" almost every Freedom you can imagine disappears for ordinary people and expands limitlessly for a handful of people in power.

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

what life had taught me is that where we come from is a point -- not the starting point, not the defining point -- just a point. It's where we are that really counts.

Drinking was what you did when things were so overwhelmingly good you needed a hangover to tamp them down, or when things were so overwhelmingly bad you needed to forget.

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless,'" Arundhati Roy has said. "There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

Do you want a piece of advice from your old father? Not really. Don't look back so much or you'll get wiped out on the tree in front of you.

A gray cloud swung its belly over the brush at the summit and fat drops of rain burst on the windscreen and splattered into the car and dotted up and down my arms. I hung out of the car and let the rain fall on my face.

He was as fragile as wood smoke, barely a memory against the landscape.

The moon, which would be full within the week, pulsed huge and silver in a deep black sky. The lake, black and secret and long, stretched out as far as I could see, joining with the sky in a seamless circle of darkness.

I landed on a carpet of moss and looked up at pieces of torn sky breaking through a dense roof of foliage.

You can't insist on a life. A life insists on you.

Grief is an eroding wind. After grief has blown through, there is just the bedrock of a person.

Once you went outlaw, then you were there, and that's where you stayed.

I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look Africa; and yet here I still was.

Another marathon was on; a rerun surely, there couldn't be this many marathons going on all the time anywhere on Earth.

There is only one time of absolute silence. Halfway between the dark of night and the light of morning, all animals and crickets and birds fall into a profound silence as if pressed quiet by the deep quality of the blackest time of night...This silence is how I know it is not yet dawn, nor is it the middle of the night, but it is the place of no-time, when all things sleep most deeply, when their guard is dozing

Paul Theroux, she adores his long, grumpy travelogues, his trips around Africa especially.

In the hot, slow time of day when time and sun and thought slow to a dragging, shallow, pale crawl, there is the sound of heat. The grasshoppers and crickets sing and whine. Drying grass crackles. Dogs pant. There is the sound of breath and breathing, of an entire world collapsed under the apathy of the tropics.

We belonged nowhere here; we belonged nowhere else.

How poorly we communicate, even the most drastic messages, even to ourselves.