Jeffrey Gettleman > Quotes

“I discovered something I would inflict on myself several more times: the primacy of loneliness. If you’re working hard and lonely, or traveling a lot and lonely, or even chasing down a dream and lonely, you’re still, at the heart of it, just lonely.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“If you’re with the one you love, the rest should be logistics.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“It pains me that I will never be able to do it again, return to that same place, that same time, in that same state of mind, eager and uninformed, and, best, unformed.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman

“It's easy to explain why you like something. But love? That's tricky. That's a story, not a sentence.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“you can have it all, just not at the same time.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“Everybody should work at a small newspaper. The amount of life you take in is staggering.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“Often it’s not the bad things that split people apart but the opportunities.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“you know everything you need to know about a guy by seeing how he treats waiters.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“First comes Coke, then asphalt, then power lines, then maybe education, justice, and human rights.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“it takes no more than ten grown men to prevent a stationary car from getting away—”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“What if they didn’t even want my help? From pit latrines to condoms, we were trying to assist countless people in every aspect of their lives, from how they shit to how they fuck. And many didn’t even like us. And now they were torching our cars.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“The aid industry has saved millions of lives, but it is complicated (and maybe this is a necessary evil) by a set of feelings that often leave the getters feeling patronized and the givers feeling a little cynical.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“More than 2,000 years ago Herodotus wrote, “In peaceful times, children inter their parents. In war times, parents inter their children.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“There’s exactly one difference between an adventure and a tragedy: death.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“I can’t remember any time the Americans have delivered a worse mess than this. You know what they’re doing?” He bent forward and dropped his voice to a whisper—that’s what I loved about Louis, life was a Le Carré novel to him. “They’re still backing the warlords. The CIA never cut the assistance, even after the clerics kicked the warlords’ ass, despite all those briefcases of cash. You know the assholes the CIA was backing? Qanyare? Abdi Qeybdiid? Hussein Aidid? They were the same assholes who shot down your helicopters during Black Hawk Down. You Americans”—he waved his lit cigarette at me—“you’re so tragic at history.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“often it helps to hang it on the boss. It’s also the tone you strike, the eye contact.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“The superpowers took some of the least developed areas on earth, like the Somali desert or the Congo River basin, and pumped in first-world killing equipment. They installed leaders of these tinderboxes on the basis not of genuine popularity but merely of who would do their bidding.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“There’s this notion, lived just about every day out here, that nothing’s easy but anything’s possible.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“they were in that bulging-eyed, unreachable state human beings morph into right before they kill.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“if you’re wondering if we were absolutely insane to march out into the middle of the desert and place our lives in the hands of a band of freshly bloodstained outlaws led by a man named Commander Peacock, I can offer an explanation: the transitive property of trust. Reporters deposit their lives in it all the time. People I’d trusted had hooked me up with people they’d trusted who hooked me up with people they’d trusted. Peacock and I were simply two terminal points on a long line drawn by trust.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“Worrying about wildlife that we so love to observe can sound painfully quaint - this is exactly what Binyavanga Wainaina parodied in 'How to Write about Africa'. Well, such is the plight of Mzungus - and, in a way, of adults. Don't we all bemoan the loss of what we first fell for in our youth? And weren't these the world's treasures?”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“The world does not have enough topic sentences.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“These young men said they had plenty of friends of different tribes back in “uni,” but up here, it was different. “Why is it different?” I asked. “Because this is about family,” one said. For years, politicians on all sides had stoked their bases by casting aspersions on other ethnic groups, talking about dangers to “the community.” There was tinder lying everywhere in Kenya. The stolen election became the fuse, and the result was front-page news around the world.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“Once I heard a remark made about a certain New York television reporter to the effect that he was the type who would have asked, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” I suspect that Mr. Gettleman fits that description.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“America’s decision to green-light Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia and overthrow a popular, grassroots, and surprisingly effective Islamist administration led, over the next five years, to the explosion of chaos, high-seas piracy, terrorism spreading across East Africa, and ultimately the next Somali famine, in which more than 250,000 people died. That policy decision was one of the most questionable in recent history—right behind Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 2, if measured in lives lost, although I’m not sure what else you’d measure it in.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“With crowds, it can always go either way. You have to be respectful. But the energy of a crowd, man, the way it moves as one, there’s nothing like it.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“The cook, the gardener, and the guard stayed behind the main house in a cold-water shack with a rusted roof, like a piece of a slum that had somehow gotten lost and stopped behind the mansion to ask for directions.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“Africa had the rotten luck to gain its freedom at the height of the Cold War, which meant dozens of young nations had been instantly reeled into the maelstrom, on one side or the other, and instead of building courthouses, highways, or universities—exactly what these fragile, artificially created countries needed—the United States and USSR built arsenals.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“There’s always that thrill of learning something new, feeling your brain grow inside your head, no matter what that something is.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“as soon as the Berlin Wall came crumbling down, the Mobutus became an embarrassment. There was suddenly no reason to prop them up. The West abruptly disengaged from Africa, and the Mobutus toppled over, one after the other, like evil little dolls.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival