Antjie Krog > Quotes

“I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences.”
― Antjie Krog

“It's hard for me to speak, whether in English or Afrikaans. The reason I write is because I cannot speak. I feel blunt.”
― Antjie Krog

“And everyone wants to know: Who? Why? The victims ask the hardest of all the questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you?”
― Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa

“By not dealing with past human rights violations, we are not simply protecting the perpetrators' trivial old age ; we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
― Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa

“People thought that the Truth Commission would be this quick fix, this Rugby World Cup scenario, and that we would go through the process and fling our arms around each other and be blood brothers forevermore. And that is nonsense--absolute nonsense. The TRC is where the reality of this country is hitting home and hitting home very hard. And that is good. But there will be no grand release--every individual will have to devise his or her own personal method of coming to terms with what has happened.”
― Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa

“Something else may be missing here,’ says Thabo. ‘Before 1990, we all had distorted images of each other. Whites are like this and blacks are like that. From 1990 to 1994, we realized with growing astonishment how many things we actually do have in common. How much is shared between Afrikaner and African. How little Ubuntu Communism and Boere Socialism differ from one another, how much of an old-fashioned Christian ethic underscores all our comings and goings. That is why the elections were such a success. Because of what bound us together and what future we envisioned.’ ‘And what was that?’ ‘I would say: in spite of our different colours and languages and incomes, we accepted that we are actually of each other, we care for one another, we will stand in queues together and vote, because we grant each other a future in this country.”
― Antjie Krog, A Change of Tongue