Quotes by South African Authors - Page 19

They have been taught nothing but destruction and learned nothing except that a man's desires can be achieved simply by killing anybody who stands in his way.
Wilbur Smith
He saved me in so many ways. I didn't see it at first. He saved me from certain death. He's the scariest person I've ever met, but for some reason I felt safe with him. Now I'm just a fading star amongst all the bright ones...All I want is love and all I get is people trying to kill me and take away what peace I manage to find in between.
Michelle Horst
Absolute freedom is an illusion. For while an employed man might be free from starvation, he is a slave to his employer's financial aspirations, and, working-hours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
At forty two years, Sona Kilroy stood tall and strapping, a powerful figure. Rising to the rank of Admiral in the Corsair fleet was no easy feat. It took intelligence, talent, determination, resilience, creative thinking, brute force, and sheer cunning to achieve – and perhaps also a large slice of luck.
Christina Engela
If untruths become part of our language—untruths that in context are intended to be interpreted as polite expressions or figure of speech—then each person is left to decide for themselves the meaning of any sentence. And when language and meaning become subjective, society breaks down. The rule of law becomes a grey area. Commands become suggestions. And how do you keep anyone, including yourself, accountable for actions based on ambiguous language?
Alex Latimer
This is the same establishment that all those who want, or rather aspire to, to be literary figures of the century, artists, painters and sculptors want acceptance from and approval. They want to be looked up to. Young and upcoming poets must approach their craft with an almost angelic perspective. So many writers are missing a condensed fusion in their writing, they condescend to their audience, the truth is not spoken in their work, they gabble, their words seem to make a hot fuss on the page. What do they gain? They gain this, simply nothing. Poets must assemble and present their work accordingly to how they see fit and should be careful of advice from other writers and editors. Sometimes there can be too much going on in the words that are meant to be given with the best of intentions.
Abigail George
School overpopulates students’ minds with too much of what happened yesterday; seldom with what the students can do today, or, tomorrow.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. We drown in the thick sweetness of our sensual excess, and our shameless opulence, while our discontent souls suffocate in the arid wasteland of spiritual deprivation.
Anthon St. Maarten
And I will close my eyes and prepare myself so that they can unscrew my head and allow the map to slip into my lacunae. So that I can be filled and braced from the inside and fortified for the voyage. Because without my world inside me I will contract and congeal, more even than I am now, without speech and without actions and without any purchase upon time.
Marlene Van Niekerk
Being captain of such a vessel was not a stressful job, despite the sheer size of the thing. Everything was automated, and this meant that this behemoth could be efficiently handled by a far less seasoned captain. Besides, hiring mature skippers with actual experience would cost real money. And hey, the computers ran everything anyway – and that’s how Bran Johannsen enters this story – as a fine young inexperienced graduate of the Merchant Space Academy in Mars City, who only got his Executive Officer’s ticket four short years ago.
Christina Engela
Thou shalt not tweet to be retweeted.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The passenger liner Ossifar Distana was one of the most luxurious of its kind in space anywhere. It ferried the cream of society across the void in opulence and style. Only the wealthiest could afford an apartment on this ship for a trip of any duration, even a short one around the proverbial block. Even the crew was obliged to pay rent.
Christina Engela
A blank cheque kills creativity.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Hope is the spotlight that shines on the mine fields of possibility
Tony Dovale
Most employees are smarter than their employers. All employers are braver than their employees.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Though you can get smart from reading everything that a smart person writes, you cannot get famous from reading about everything that a famous person does or is said to have done.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We the living are to blame for the painfulness of being dead.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Procrastination threatens critics’ livelihood.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Do not distance yourself from people who need you most today, because tomorrow you will need them the most.
Gift Gugu Mona
The happiest of endings begin with a struggle so embrace yours
Nomzamo Nhlumayo
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
Nelson Mandela
An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Call me a Freak all u want really...I honestly take it as a compliment everytime. No matter how it was intended.
Daleen Van Tonder
The presence of confidence can make an unable man appear able. While its absence can make an able man appear unable.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you cannot give God glory for something, you should not do it. If a person is not fully persuaded that an activity is pleasing to God, then it is a sin: "whatsoever is not of faith is sin" (Romans 14:23)
Alan de Jager
Most of us cling to life as if our existence were a result of our deed or choice.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To a man, a woman is fun to be with … until she gains weight. To a woman, a man is fun to live with … until he loses his job.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Sex is Not Love
Lizelle DuPlessis
A recurrent question about photography is how much self expression it allows the photographer. There are two standard positions, each corresponding to a different location oh photographic skill. The opposition is neatly summed up in Bioy Casares’s novel The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (1989). The hero Nicolasito Almanza declares: ‘I am convinced that all of photography depends on the moment we press the release […] I believe that you’re a photographer if you know exactly when to press the release.’ In making this declaration he is responding to the opinion expressed by Mr Gruter, owner of a photographic laboratory: ‘[…] sometimes I wonder if the true work of the photographer doesn’t begin in the dark room, amid the trays and the enlarger.
Clive Scott
If e-book readers were invented before print books, (petty things such as) the smell of ink would have been some people’s only reason for not abandoning e-books.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Revolution?” Arno laughed. “What happened wasn’t a revolution. It was a deal. The creation of a new bunch of entrepreneurs who could be more easily manipulated by international capital.
Harry Kalmer
An Appreciative inquiry Conversation is the catalyst for strengths based innovation.
Tony Dovale
Christians believe their God gave us all free will - strange that for over 2000 years, they have tried to take that choice away.
Christina Engela
To increase the odds of being thanked, some people compliment some people; some make kids.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people will hate you for not loving them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting
Lauren Beukes
Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' ... he... felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness... like a gush of warm water... All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a tender of the soil.
J.M. Coetzee
Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discover that an idea I thought was new and original, something I set down in a notebook yesterday, is already contained in another note from years before. Sometimes the second version repeats the first, almost word for word, across the space of a decade. The earlier version, once brought with clarity to the surface, has been covered over again by layers of yellowing paper.
Ivan Vladislavić
So, show the world, make it seeYou are you, and I am me.
Christina Engela
The last week hadn’t been any better, come to think of it. On Monday they arrived at Gorda, just to find that the cargo of electronics he was to ship to Beowulf had been taken by another freighter for a lower fee. It took him until Wednesday before he found another cargo – which had to reach Earth by Saturday. The last straw was when his crew mutinied a day out of the Hermes system and demanded a pay increase. The union tended to call that sort of thing “collective bargaining”, not actually mutiny, but hey – the results are the same. He tended to favor the term “piracy”, but this wasn’t the high seas and out here, there were real pirates to worry about. His former crew had also wanted more time off and a better cook – at least one who knew how which end of a frying pan to hold. He was unable to comply, and so was forced to stop at Beowulf anyway. That was the last time he saw them. Fortunately for him, Weaver, Fuller and Jang opted to stay with him. Whether it was out of loyalty, or perhaps just convenience, he never knew.
Christina Engela
Indeed, there is something in this valley, some spirit and some life, and much to talk about in the huts. Although nothing has come yet, something is here already.
Alan Paton
The 'institution of marriage' is being threatened - by people getting married? Huh?
Christina Engela
She's not moody. She's just known for her versatility of emotions.
Louise Lotz
There is a correlation between one’s estimation of the odds of finding a new lover who is, at the least, of the same standard as they one they’re currently in a dead relationship with, and, their attempting to revive a dead relationship.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Poets must be grounded in the education of the arts, drama, history, mysticism, esotericism, and philosophy. To gain knowledge and become learned of the above is easy - read. Poets should apply this knowledge to their work, so a poet will advance to the next level, to their next phase of their emotional, psychological and spiritual development, growing in years in a short space of time, in hours or months if he or she is an avid reader. This knowledge will birth work that is not meretricious but of noble parentage.
Abigail George
Love is illogical. You fall into it like a manhole. Then you're just stuck. You die in love more than you live in love.
Tarryn Fisher
Nobody enjoys the company of others as intensely as someone who usually avoids the company of others.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
By drinking, a boy acts like a man. After drinking, many a man acts like a boy.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
They burned this neighbourhood down in the early 1900s to prevent the spread of bubonic plague, and it occurs to me that they should consider doing it again, to purge the blight of well-meaning hipsters desperately trying to paint it rainbow
Lauren Beukes
I now argue that entry into Upper Palaeolithic caves was probably seen as virtually indistinguishable from entry into the mental vortex that leads to the experiences and hallucinations of deep trance.
James David Lewis-Williams
And my hopes they are high I must keep them small
Troye Sivan
If you are able to talk about your life and the joys and sorrows you have experienced, if you know your story, you are much more likely to be a skillful parent.
Desmond Tutu
My best memory of school was probably leaving school. Because I hated that fucking place.
Troye Sivan
One of the most common and most dangerous misbeliefs is that it is impossible for someone to be stupid just because they are a doctor or a lawyer.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.
J.M. Coetzee
Most people would instantly start feeling ten years older if someone were to convince them that they were actually born a decade before their birthdate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Authenticity inspire respect because it takes courage to own who you really are.
Arlene Dickinson
When your dreams turn to dust, vacuum.
Wolfgang Riebe
Poverty cannot be defeated unless you first defeat it in the mind.
Nicky Verd
Ironically people will thank a deity for "letting" them win a race, but blame a "witch" if they stumble, look for the nearest suspect, and kill them. Why not blame the deity? Why not accept the setback as easily as they accept the victory/ Time people grew up some, I think - and stopped looking for theoretical "somebodies" to blame for their own misfortunes.
Christina Engela