Cameron Dick > Quotes

“I dreaded the instant when the engine would at last be turned off, leaving only silence. With that silence would come the stillness of arrival in which I would have a clear line of sight between the present and all the cumulative weeks of preparation that had been building up to this moment, one that I now recognized had been travelling towards me over my entire life, a preordained event.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“Whole histories and landscapes were reduced to anecdotal details of motion in the space of hours.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“Travel is but a steady siphoning of a massive crowd: a repetitive process of milling together and being redirected into a smaller line.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“There was no thunder, no crack of lightning to announce the arrival of the storm. The amassing clouds simply burst. The air was set in motion as the rain came tumbling and rustling towards the ground in synchronised freefall. I felt a rush of vertigo in my stomach as I braced for impact. A curtain of rain was soon pouring off the clay shingles. The sheer driving force sent mud splashing up where we sat, and soon formed a rut in the flower garden along the edge of the porch.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“Tribe,” I said aloud, testing the word as I leaned back in my chair. If I had to be isolated, I may as well make it count in a place of my choosing. Wikondiek was off the beaten tourist track; only a dozen westerners had ever ventured to the village. There was no reason to go there – unless of course you were invited, unless you found the door and knocked and it was opened for you. It was the same door whose handle now lay at my fingertips.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“It was a whimsical cliché come to life. Meanwhile, I was the bee in the honeycomb, untouched by the gentle breeze stirring the new leaves. The interview was only supposed to last half an hour, but my whole body was already humming with a painful self-awareness. Every line in my expression, every twitch of an eyebrow, felt poised to impart a poor impression.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“I was surrounded by a cartoon world outlined in wet light, glimmering and sultry from past rain and weighty with the promise of more to come.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“I suddenly realized just how far I had surpassed the boundaries of the familiar order of things.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“The unarticulated components of belief are often the most profound – the ones so embedded in a culture that the people of a given place accept them without question. Together they make up the meaningful cornerstones on which the hefty weight of a world view is founded.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“With nothing to do but wait, I tried to settle into a daze to distort the unbroken hours ahead. Mr. Morris did so effortlessly, but I had to fight to subdue a rising tide of impatience. The smallest thing – an itch behind my ear or a gurgle in my stomach – were buoyant irritancies that kept hoisting me up and out of my reverie. I pushed to go deeper, to burrow into the unplumbed depths of that untouchable quiet within us all that is unmoved by our niggling sensations. Even the air was somehow too potent with the perfume of flowering plants to permit anything but acute alertness. When I could stand it no longer, I emerged out of breath from my daydream as if surfacing from underwater.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“The history of the vast African continent exceeds imagination: a million odd years may as well be an eternity when shored up against the brief spark that makes up a human life. It was perhaps in this very region that conscious thought first passed over man like a violent fever; turning in circles, he suddenly noted his footprints and perceived that his hands were moulded into dexterity. He recognized the sun, the distant trees, and the troubled sands on the horizon, and felt the vagueness of unease as the past and present took shape. A great deal of mystery still shrouds the origins of the enigmatic sub-Saharan African, whose existence has been reduced to stone and clay artefacts and scattered bones. Among the crags and overhangs, these earliest people painted on cave walls with red dyes, formed the first syllables of language, and buried their dead in a budding awareness of religious ceremony.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1

“It smelled of another world and in that smell was no premonitory memory. All was pungent, robust: the fluttering motes of a thousand unknown spores ready to burst into life.”
― Cameron Dick, Head of the Hyena: Volume 1