Quotes from Peter Abrahams

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

Being born white in South Africa or anywhere in the empire and Commonwealth automatically conferred this special status. You had no problem finding a place to live, a job, trade union membership, access to social services. Being white, speaking English, you were accepted as English, entitled to all the rights of citizenship.

You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.

There is a qualitative difference between being a minority and being a majority. Majorities are stronger under psychological pressure because numbers count. But only if they are aware of it.

The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.

To get from people you had to give a piece of yourself, a real piece that mattered. Just being nice was not enough.

We can turn our earth into a barren, lifeless minor star spinning in space, waterless, with little or no atmosphere, with not even cockroaches left on it. To face this possibility and still behave with decency; to still create beautiful things as though they will last forever; to still make music and poetry and paint pictures; to still consciously cultivate the gentler, tender side of ourselves is to aspire to a grace which makes us more than the animals we surely are.

Holy war is not about religion. Holy war is needed by anyone who works for humans or lives among humans, because even the mildest demons can blind you and make you break laws that were meant to protect peace and prosperity of others. Even the tiniest amount of demons can make you harass and attack innocent people in streets, homes, neighborhoods, workplaces and even countries.

Tribal man is not an individual in the western sense. Psychologically and emotionally, he is the present living personification of a number of forces, among the most important of which are the ancestral dead.

Love is not some mushy feeling for your parents that you are born with, or a romanticized sexuality you learn from magazines. It is action. If you know what love is you can never be in doubt about whether someone loves you or you love someone.

To have the ability to destroy all and not to do it was one of the hard tests humanity passed -- but only just -- in the middle of the twentieth century.

No one can blame his defeat in a holy war on another person, priest, group or religion. Each man's holy war is his own.

There is hope for all the colored people in this country while one white woman can love one colored man.

At this moment we are as close as people can ever hope to be. Our hearts have beaten together, our bodies have merged. Right now I know what love is. I know how it feels to be not completely alone. Right now I know you as I have never known anybody else.

You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer--history shows it's better if you're not--but you have to understand your badness.

The holy cannot be gained by the unholy.

The first summer after the end of the war was beautiful.

There is a qualitative difference between being a minority and being a majority. Majorities are stronger under psychological pressure because numbers count. But only if they are aware of it.

Deep, short and sincere holy life is by far better than a supposedly long holy life punctuated by capitulations to temptations and distractions.

They say life is all about connecting, like that's a good thing. But when brain and eyes are lining up you know different.

You see, love is strong. Stronger than hate even. Love is the only thing that can kill hate, nothing else. You see, hate destroys and that's why love is stronger. It builds.

The community protects and shares out of caring; love is never far away.

Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds.

And so each man wants and works, almost automatically, for the approval of his people.