André Brink > Quotes

“In love, no question is ever preposterous.”
― Andre Brink, Before I Forget

“My library was -- all libraries are -- a place of ultimate refuge, a wild and sacred space where meanings are manageable precisely because they aren't binding; and where illusion is comfortingly real.”
― André Brink

“To respect the dignity of a relationship also implies accepting the end when it comes. Except in my mind, except in my dreams, where the aftertaste of her still lingers.”
― Andre Brink, Before I Forget

“I can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it - but I can never be on the inside of it with you. I cannot even be sure whether I really know what it is like. Is it 'like' my own? Or incomparable? Just as I can never know if what you see at any given moment is exactly the same as what I see. We look at a colour. We both call it red. But it is only because we have been taught to call it by that name. There is no guarantee - not ever - that we see it in the same way, that your red is my red.”
― Andre Brink, Before I Forget

“A country can't love you. At most it may need you. It's much the same as people.”
― André P. Brink, The Rights of Desire

“My library was -- all libraries are -- a place of ultimate refuge, a wild and sacred space where meanings are manageable precisely because they aren't binding; and where illusion is comfortingly real. To read, to think, to trace words back to their origins real or presumed; to invent; to dare to imagine. "The Rights of Desire”
― André Brink

“I had never been so close to death before.
For a long time, as I lay there trying to clear my mind, I couldn't think coherently at all, conscious only of a terrible, blind bitterness. Why had they singled me out? Didn't they understand? Had everything I'd gone through on their behalf been utterly in vain? Did it really count for nothing? What had happened to logic, meaning and sense?
But I feel much calmer now. It helps to discipline oneself like this, writing it down to see it set out on paper, to try and weigh it and find some significance in it.
Prof Bruwer: There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.
I wanted to help. Right. I meant it very sincerely. But I wanted to do it on my terms. And I am white, and they are black. I thought it was still possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. I thought that to reach out and touch hands across the gulf would be sufficient in itself. But I grasped so little, really: as if good intentions from my side could solve it all. It was presumptuous of me. In an ordinary world, in a natural one, I might have succeeded. But not in this deranged, divided age. I can do all I can for Gordon or scores of others who have come to me; I can imagine myself in their shoes, I can project myself into their suffering. But I cannot, ever, live their lives for them. So what else could come of it but failure?
Whether I like it or not, whether I feel like cursing my own condition or not -- and that would only serve to confirm my impotence -- I am white. This is the small, final, terrifying truth of my broken world. I am white. And because I am white I am born into a state of privilege. Even if I fight the system that has reduced us to this I remain white, and favored by the very circumstances I abhor. Even if I'm hated, and ostracized, and persecuted, and in the end destroyed, nothing can make me black. And so those who are cannot but remain suspicious of me. In their eyes my very efforts to identify myself with Gordon, whit all the Gordons, would be obscene. Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and discover for themselves their integrity and affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption?
On the other hand: what can I do but what I have done? I cannot choose not to intervene: that would be a denial and a mockery not only of everything I believe in, but of the hope that compassion may survive among men. By not acting as I did I would deny the very possibility of that gulf to be bridged.
If I act, I cannot but lose. But if I do not act, it is a different kind of defeat, equally decisive and maybe worse. Because then I will not even have a conscience left.
The end seems ineluctable: failure, defeat, loss. The only choice I have left is whether I am prepared to salvage a little honour, a little decency, a little humanity -- or nothing. It seems as if a sacrifice is impossible to avoid, whatever way one looks at it. But at least one has the choice between a wholly futile sacrifice and one that might, in the long run, open up a possibility, however negligible or dubious, of something better, less sordid and more noble, for our children…
They live on. We, the fathers, have lost.”
― Andre Brink, A Dry White Season

“Sometimes, in one of his more exuberant or desperate moods, Pa would go out in the veld and sprinkle brandy on the daisies to make them drunk so that they wouldn't feel the pain of shrivelling up and dying.”
― André P. Brink, The Rights of Desire

“How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.

Alone. Alone to the very end. I… every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?”
― Andre P. Brink, A Dry White Season

“Ouma Nella’s quotes p 144 -146
“Man, if you don’t know where you going, any road will bring you there.”

“It don’t matter how far a river run. It never forget where it come from. That is all that is important.”

“No matter if it’s wet or dry,” she grunt. “As long as you keep a green branch in your heart, there will always be a bird that come to sing in it.”

“It’s no use crying in the rain, my child, because no one will see your tears.
“Don't think you can climb two trees at the same time just because you got two legs.”

“Ouma Nella, where am I not?”
“But you’re right here with me, Philida. So there’s many places where you’re not.”
“Tell me where those places are. I got to know. So I can go and look for myself.”
― andre brink, Philida

“But for Mozart love is only the litmus test. To determine whether one is truly free or not.”
― Andre Brink, Before I Forget

“As Alan Paton said, 'Ah but your fucking land is beautiful'.”
― André Brink, Devil's Valley: A Darkly Humorous Literary Mystery Where Grotesque Reality and Supernatural Secrets Collide

“Dis nie net die dooies wat in jou inweek en deel van jou word nie: dis almal, elke enkele een met wie jy 'n entjie pad saamreis; elkeen gee af aan jou, jy aan hulle. Nooit is dit net jy en jy alleen nie. Nooit gebeur iets net NOU nie. Altyd sleep dit slierte saam. Altyd suig dit by voorbaat al die toekoms in.”
― André P. Brink

“Everything one used to take for granted, with so much certainty that one never even bothered to enquire about it, now turns out to be illusion. Your certainties are proven lies. And what happens if you start probing? Must you learn a wholly new language first?

'Humanity'. Normally one uses it as a synonym for compassion; charity; decency; integrity. 'He is such a human person.' Must one now go in search of an entirely different set of synonyms: cruelty; exploitation; unscrupulousness; or whatever?”
― Andre P. Brink

“The most I can do is to go as far as I can, writing my own story in the dust with my two feet, word for word.”
― André Brink, Philida

“I was born on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in the early spring of 1960.”
― André Brink

“One can see plainly that there is thunder brooding in his head, but he refuses to speak to them.”
― André Brink, Philida

“it’s a white man’s farm, and we are only the hands that work here, the feet that tread the grapes in the big vat, or churn up dust on the wide yard around the longhouse, we are the backs that bend until they feel like breaking, we are the necks that get throttled, the stomachs that get hollow from hunger, and mine are the hands that keep on knitting and knitting and honest-to-God never stop knitting,”
― André Brink, Philida

“Eleanor Baker is een van Afrikaans se beste skrywers en dis jammer dat baie Suid-Afrikaners dit dalk nooit, of te laat, gaan agterkom nie. ”
― André P. Brink

“(Nie eers gebad nie, omdat ek nie van jou geheime ontslae wou raak nie.)”
― André Brink, Vlam in die Sneeu: Die Liefdesbriewe

“No matter if it’s wet or dry, she grunt. As long as you keep a green branch in your heart, there will always be a bird that come to sing in it.”
― André Brink, Philida

“Want “jy is een-en-al asem en son”.”
― André Brink, Vlam in die Sneeu: Die Liefdesbriewe

“Daar is net twee soorte waansin waarteen mens op jou hoede moet wees, Ben,” sê hy rustig. “Die een is dat ons alles kan doen. Die ander is dat ons niks kan doen nie.”
― André P. Brink, 'n Droë wit seisoen

“Shots. Shouts. Dogs.”
― André Brink, A Dry White Season

“Then, one day, you discover that life itself is slipping past and you’re just a bloody parasite, something white and maggot-like, not really a human being, just a thing, a sweet and ineffectual thing. And even if you try to call for help, they don’t understand you. They don’t even hear you. Or they think it’s just a new craze and start doing their best to humour you.”
― André P. Brink, A Dry White Season

“Maar dis geen suiwer, sober soort koue wat alles tot die skelet verhelder nie: dis triestig en modderig; ook vir die hart. Niks kan hier uitkristalliseer nie – hoogstens versteen.”
― André Brink, Vlam in die Sneeu: Die Liefdesbriewe

“Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and discover for themselves their integrity and affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption?”
― André Brink, A Dry White Season

“Dis nie Franschhoek se stilte nie – waar daar minstens krieke buite was, en jou stem of jou heer-like soet asemhaling in my arm – dis eenvoudig ’n blote afwesigheid van geluid of lewe.”
― André Brink, Vlam in die Sneeu: Die Liefdesbriewe

“Op die oomblik wil ek net hééltemal gelukkig, irrasioneel, alles ongesorteer in my onderbewuste voel – woorde, sintuiglike indrukke, uitdrukkinge van jou oë, die beweging van jou heerlike klein lyf, jou stem, beloftes, speletjies, trane, en alle soorte “geheime”.”
― André Brink, Vlam in die Sneeu: Die Liefdesbriewe

“Happiness? It was one of the saddest nights of my life, an ageless sadness that insinuated itself into the very heart of this new world and deepened slowly into anguish and agony. There she was sleeping, closer to me than anyone had ever been to me, exposed and available, utterly trusting, at my disposal to love, to look at, to touch, to explore, to enter: and yet, in that peaceful deep sleep more remote than any star, ungraspable, forever, apart. I knew her eyes and the inside of her mouth, her nipples in rest and arousal, every limb of her slight smooth body, every individual finger and toe; I could examine if I wished each secret hair. And yet it amounted to nothing, nothing at all. Our bodies had joined and turned and clasped, and shared the spasms of pleasure and of pain. But having touched, we were again separate; and in her sleep, as she smiled, or whimpered, or lay breathing quietly, she was as far from me as if we'd never met. I wanted to cry. But the ache was too deep to be relieved by tears.”
― André Brink, A Dry White Season