Quotes by South African Authors - Page 16

We can do away with ignorance, if we take it upon ourselves to encourage each other to use our intelligence.
Unarine Ramaru
There would definitely be way fewer instances of cheating, if the average couple did not have sex only when the woman feels like it.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You will need to stay calm as you witness the candy floss in your daughter’s smile harden into brittle bitchiness. You will need to muster a new resolve as your son’s fascination with Pokémon shifts to porn. You will have to recalibrate your mothering instinct to accommodate the notion that not only do your children poop and burp, they also masturbate, drink and smoke. As their bodies, brains and worlds rearrange themselves, you will need to do your own reshuffling. You will come to see that, though you gave them life, they’re the ones who’ve got a life. They’ve got 1700 friends on Facebook. They’ve got YouTube accounts (with hundreds of sub- scribers), endless social arrangements, concerts, Valentine’s Day dances and Halloween parties. What we have – if we’re lucky – is a ‘Thanks for the ride, Mum, don’t call me, I’ll call you,’ as they slam the car door and indicate we can run along now.
Joanne Fedler
We are all orbits of some sort,circling around the world we call our own, and literature...Literature is a compass;
Thabo Jijana
Rethink Your Mindset because...The view your brain builds and automatically adopts...of yourself, profoundly affects the way you think, feel and act-moment to moment, and the results you create.
Tony Dovale
Some people have contracted HIV during their separate endeavours to give someone or some people a curable STD.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Contrast is important in life. We understand what light is because we can compare it with what we know is dark. Sweet is made sweeter after we eat something bitter. It’s the very same with sadness. And it’s important to experience sadness, to embrace it in order to truly know happiness. I was just a flat line until he came along. And maybe now I’m hurting. But isn’t that what love is supposed to do? Make you feel, make you brave, make you look at yourself more carefully?
Tarryn Fisher
Rejecting your gay or transgender child won't make them straight. It will only mean you will lose them.
Christina Engela
So often when people hear about the suffering in our world, they feel guilty, but rarely does guilt actually motivate action like empathy or compassion. Guilt paralyzes and causes us to deny and avoid what makes us feel guilty. The goal is to replace our guilt with generosity. We all have a natural desire to help and to care, and we simply need to allow ourselves to give from our love without self-reproach. We each must do what we can. This is all that God asks of us." - , God Has a Dream, p. 87-88
Desmond Tutu
In love, no question is ever preposterous.
André Brink
Why has he taken this job?... For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.
J.M. Coetzee
Eating a salad (in public) is an overweight person’s attempt to appear in control.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.
Nadine Gordimer
Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it's only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.
Lauren Beukes
The boring thing about being interesting is that you bore boring people.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A risk to own anything : a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around. Not enough shoes, cars, cigarettes. Too many people too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day.
J.M. Coetzee
Expensive clothing is a poor man’s attempt to appear prosperous.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
As a South African I honestly cannot understand how people can't see South Africa as a unique nation, untied by ties of history, bonds of suffering, victory, struggles, hope - and in more ways than I ever before thought possible - blood.
Christina Engela
Suffering isn't ennobling recovery is.
Christian N. Barnard
Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and apsirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.
Nelson Mandela
The universe is so vast, so immense, we can never expect to explore it all. It is in effect, not so much a final frontier as an ultimate frontier; the ultimate frontier – as wide as it is deep. Stars shine coldly in the unimaginable blackness. Out of the darkness, a tiny speck caught the distant light of stars – a tiny gray speck that, as it moved, seemed to grow larger, catching the light just so until it revealed itself to be a ship.
Christina Engela
Isn't it interesting how nationalistic attitudes foster the notion that being gay is 'un-(fill in your nationality/ religion/ culture here)'?
Christina Engela
A tapping foot isn’t the best a listener can get from a song: A good song makes a listener dance. A great song makes him think.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers".
Bryce Courtenay
I wasn't put on this earth to be housekeeper to my own child or to anyone else for that matter.
Lynn Freed
Rich men use most of their money to get richer. Poor men use most of their money to look richer.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Your mind is the most powerful wonder. It can be your greatest enemy or your closest ally.There are no limits to what you can achieve if only you believe.
Michelle Horst
Worrying about what happened on Monday, or, what might happen on Wednesday, is at the expense of one’s Tuesday.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Timaset didn’t need a ship – especially not a flying museum piece! And as far as he knew, a dodgy plasma injector could drop you smack into a wormhole ending somewhere on the other side of the universe with no way back. Well, he could always sell the damn thing. Couldn’t he? He could use the money. Damn, he could always use the money! Maybe the crew would want to buy it over from him?
Christina Engela
Not every happy person is married, and, Not every married person is happy.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Once employed, the employed's friends are reduced to creatures that he only sees when he has a new problem, or, something new to show off.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
1 Minute Wisdom: Rethink Your Mindset because how you view, filter, interpret and automatically give meaning your experiences; is what you'll believe them to be.
Tony Dovale
First smile!! An unseasonal little shower of rain fell here, and a lot of butterflies drowned, so we put them in the sun and they came back to life, and flew up and then Agaat SMILED!
Marlene Van Niekerk
Every wild thing is in tune with its surroundings, awake to its fate and in absolute harmony with the planet. Their attention is focused totally outwards. Humans, on the other hand, tend to focus introspectively on their own lives too often, brooding and magnifying problems that the animal kingdom would not waste a millisecond of energy upon. To most people, the magnificent order of the natural world where life and death actually mean something has become unrecognizable.
Lawrence Anthony
Eyes are a deaf man’s ears. Ears are a blind man’s eyes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An agnostic is a creature that is religiously skeptical whenever it is told that God exists … or that He doesn’t.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Rise of Science DenialismThe problem is, in a world where some people (even in the USA, where someone like Donald Trump was allowed to rise to the level of a serious presidential candidate in 2016) have descended to such levels of ignorance that science itself is dismissed by leaders, political and religious as ‘an agenda’, and frightening numbers of people cling to ignorance and superstition because it suits their conservative anti-human rights views and objectives.
Christina Engela
There is little to be said in favour of poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship. Many people will appear to befriend you when you are wealthy, but precious few will do the same when you are poor
Nelson Mandela
I would like to believe that logic is questioning your reasoning to reach a conclusion.
Unarine Ramaru
Women hold all the power. They should use it like a whip, not offer it up like a sacrifice.
Tarryn Fisher
Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked—not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life.
Mark Gevisser
To test a man, determine how much it takes to make him lie.
C.J. Langenhoven
Humility is perfect quietness of heart. It is to expect nothing, to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am blamed or despised. It is to have a blessed home in the Lord, where I can go in and shut the door, and kneel to my Father in secret, and am at peace as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and above is trouble.
Andrew Murray
Generally, people need less than a quarter of what they want.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically.
James David Lewis-Williams
There is a huge difference between those who follow Christ by words only and those who do so by action. The latter will always let you experience the steadfast love of God whenever you come into contact with them.
Gift Gugu Mona
I think it's hard for you to fall in love because you like control, and you can't control what another person does or feels, so you keep all your cards.
Tarryn Fisher
But are the twin souls destined to be together? Synchronicity is at work here to bring the two back together again. How entrancing to find the same magical alchemy still at work, just as it was at the first meeting – a recognition of a deep rooted love so entrenched and so accepted, it could only have been forged in other lifetimes together. And probably that is what love at first sight is, recognition of an ancient love.
Chimnese Davids
He thought about it for a minute. The kitty was only around seven thousand give or take a gold tooth and some coinage – minus the ship – which must’ve been worth well, a lot more than seven thousand, even in scrap metal. An alarm was going off somewhere, faintly.
Christina Engela
Although a little noisy at first, in a bizarre twist of fate, electronic music became popular in France in the 1890’s before fizzling out in favor of Swing music – which somehow made an early appearance in the 1900’s. In another alternative timeline, the Beatles never existed and England invented popcorn and hamburgers in the 1840’s. Damn, that’s what almost happened last time again, thought Scrooby tensely, while maneuvering himself onto a stronger looking branch. Details, everything was about the details. Sometimes there was almost too much detail to keep up with.
Christina Engela
Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?
Nadine Gordimer
It is for a specific reason that you were born from that specific place. Never wish that away because it's not where you were born that matters, but who you were born to be. Jesus was born on the kraal and He became a King of Kings.
Gugu Mona
Virginity comes standard. A good head is earned.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, in this time, it is not. It is my bussines, mine alone.'This place being what?''This place being South Africa
J.M. Coetzee
You know you’ve reached the end of a relationship: when your lover now demands that your jokes be funny before they laugh.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Peace with non-fundamentalists terrifies the fundamentalist because to them, being Christian doesn't mean just being 'good' - it means being 'better' than others. Being better that others means having to see them as enemies - and making war on them. The fundamentalist views not being allowed to make war on their enemies as oppression of their faith, or defeat.
Christina Engela
Most men would no longer enjoy conversing with most women if they stopped bringing their vaginas along.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For long-term true success we mush rethink and change our mindset from only valuing "happiness" to include Well-being as the foundation.
Tony Dovale
As an unavoidable result of the inevitable loss of some physical and/or some mental abilities, many a man who has been alive for many years has become a boy again.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Be careful, Hally.""Of what? The truth? I seem to be the only one around here who is prepared to face it.
Athol Fugard