Herman Charles Bosman > Quotes

“Love wasn't just a soft, easy thing of the senses. It was hard, deep, austere.”
― Herman Charles Bosman, Jacaranda in the Night

“The room where she now stayed faced out on to a garden that was yellowed with the parched desolation of winter. The dried and leafless stalks of flowers that had bloomed in the summer stood black against the world that did not want them any more, and of whose existence they had forgotten long ago, after the last flowers had faded. Hannah Theron felt at home with these tattered stalks. Her life hung in the same sort of tatters. Only she still tried to cover herself with the rags. That was where she felt that the winter-tarnished stalks standing in a hard bitterness in a garden that did not want them any more were stronger than she was. They were defiant and they did not care, and they had shed all their pretences. They would be pulled up before the spring rains and the first sowings. They did not look forward to any future summer. In the cold wind shaking their brittleness they had no dreams of a slow life sap stirring, flowing, beating. If only she could lose this useless emotion, this wan thing that was not a hope and that had in it no element of caressingness, then she could at least stand on level terms with those things that did not regret the passing of their coloured times.”
― Herman Charles Bosman, Jacaranda in the Night

“He who hesitates is lost.
There is no real truth in that statement, of course. Any kind of a generalisation is more or less half-baked, including this one. Truth of necessity requires the exposition of both of two opposing points of view.”
― Herman Charles Bosman, Jacaranda in the Night

“There is nothing in this world, incredible though it may seem, to which the human body and with it the human soul cannot in time learn to adapt itself.”
― Herman Charles Bosman, Jacaranda in the Night

“Your time will come. But if it doesn't come, don't let that make no difference either.”
― Herman Charles Bosman, Jacaranda in the Night

“I tell you, it's misery. There is nothing more dreadful to me than the sight of people getting drunk. And that's what they call life. And that's what you call life. I tell you, it's death.”
― Herman Charles Bosman, Jacaranda in the Night