Alexandra Fuller > Quotes

“What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

“How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

“Cowboy up, cupcake.”
― Alexandra Fuller, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

“I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible--from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin--to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't know if it's even useful to try.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“This is not a full circle. It's Life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we all make to get on with it.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

“Surely until all of us own and honor one another's dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

“It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn't. You know how it is. You have to leave before the rains come, or it's too late.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Leaving Before the Rains Come

“The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absorb white man's blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattle and the blood from a woman's birthing with equal thirst. It doesn't care.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

“But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself -- maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

“Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both. When I picked up the skulls to add to my growing collection of what Vanessa called "Bobo's smelly pile," the hooked horns fell away from each other and the story of the impalas' death struggle was undone.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

“Because of all the kinds of love there are out there—romantic, passionate, parental, spousal, brotherly—the love that is touted as most unassailable, complicit, and colluding is the love between sisters.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Leaving Before the Rains Come

“You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“....The mind I love must have wild places:
a tangled orchard where damsons drop in heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, a chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody has fathomed the depths of and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

“What did I know about the fifty-five (give or take) countries of Africa? I carried within me one deep personal thread of one small part of it, and it had changed and colored everything,”
― Alexandra Fuller, Leaving Before the Rains Come

“As soon as we mistake our ease for our security, our conveniences for our human rights, our luxuries for our entitlements, we aren’t culturally distinct anymore. Then we’re part of someone else’s corporate plan, we’re a predictable, fulfilled expectation; we’re a black dot on a bottom line.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Leaving Before the Rains Come

“But this is africa, so hardly anything is normal.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

“But deep down I always knew there is no way to order chaos. It’s the fundamental theory at the beginning and end of everything; it’s the ultimate law of nature. There’s no way to win against unpredictability, to suit up completely against accidents.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Leaving Before the Rains Come

“I find luxury only encourages guests to outstay their welcome. A reptile or two keeps everyone on their toes,”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“...but the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

“It should not be possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips.... p 72”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“Until you make the unconscious conscious,” Carl Jung said, “it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Leaving Before the Rains Come

“Still, I also had grasped enough of the West’s views of such fatalism—that it made of us primitives, naïfs, and fools—to keep such beliefs to myself. In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned no one was immune to capricious tragedy. What I didn’t know then was that ignoring my own southern African knowledge was its own kind of mischief: it rendered me speechless when I should have spoken, helpless when I was profoundly capable, and broken when in fact the very places inside me that had been damaged and snapped were their own kind of strength. I saw the landscape around us as tattooed with death, fraught with the possibility of unrecovered land mines and undetonated ordnance.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Leaving Before the Rains Come

“Well-bred' ensured buckled noses, high-arched feet, a predisposition to madness, and ... an innate belief in our own unquestioning superiority.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

“Make a plan,” Dad always said. “And if that doesn’t work, make another one and if that doesn’t work, you’re probably the problem.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“...."The mind I love must have wild places:
a tangled orchard where damsons drop in heavy grass,
an overgrown little wood,
a chance of a snake or two,
a pool that nobody has fathomed the depths of...
and paths threaeded with flowers planted by the mind."

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulnes”
― Alexandra Fuller

“The problem with most people,” Dad said once, not necessarily implying that I counted as most people, but not discounting the possibility either, “is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Leaving Before the Rains Come

“The doctor in Murare is old - old for anybody. He is especially old for a doctor and especially old for an African. But he doesn´t have the luxury of retirement to look forward to. There aren´t enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don´t do it for the money or because thy want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breath or eat or love. They can´t stop. As long as they are alive, they will never not be a doctor. They can be old, or alcoholic or burnt-out, but they will always be a doctor.”
― Alexandra Fuller

“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.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood