Giles Foden > Quotes

“... la kuvunda halian ubani. There is no incense for something rotting. And that is the condition of the world. This I know.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“They thought it was an enemy but it was only their own reflection.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“there is a tendency in Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans. Had Amin been white, free Africa would have passed many resolutions condemning him. Being black is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“There again, the acceleration of history is the job of ruthless men.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“If you laugh at it, you’re stepping over the corpses. And if you work with him, well, it’s worse.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“the cause—that is the place where we cannot go.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“I was also feeding off a more general depression that sometimes settled over Kampala evenings. You had a sense of people not having gotten what they wanted during the day. The street vendors, for instance,”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“They’re more fun outside your head than in, Campbell.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“there is a tendency in Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans. Had Amin been white, free Africa would have passed many resolutions condemning him. Being black is now”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“a gigantic phantom rose suddenly out of the sea. I started backwards from a tall figure projected against a wall of ice. The wall was an iceberg—and the phantom, I slowly realised, was my own reflection, enormously enlarged.”
― Giles Foden, Turbulence

“Only then do I feel cleansed and full of vitality: the voice of the sea, the amniotic rock of it, the burst of salt air in the lungs, they can do this to you. As if the old soul, the bad soul, had been changed into little water drops and fallen into the ocean, never to be found.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“That’s exaggerating,” she said. “It’s quite a hard life here. I often wish we could go back.” “Why couldn’t you?” I said. “There’d be no point. We’re African now.” “No, we’re not,” her husband said. “And we will go back. When the time is right.” “There’s nothing for us there, Spiny. You know how depressed you got on our last leave.” “Hmm.” He looked cross, and then she turned to me, her lapis earrings gleaming. “England has changed so much since we left. You’ll find, if you stay here a few years,”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“information is perishable, lasting no longer than the structure to which it refers, just as the bathwater I was sitting in as I recalled all this would no longer be my bathwater once it ran down the plughole.”
― Giles Foden, Turbulence

“It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values—the permanence of memory. —JOSEPH CONRAD,”
― Giles Foden, Turbulence

“Scotland might as well be a foreign country to one such as myself. But then I often felt like that in England, too, as did many of us who had grown up in the colonies. It was as if we had returned to a home different from the one we had been holding in our heads all that time.”
― Giles Foden, Turbulence

“But friction is mostly a negative force, socially speaking. It reduces efficiency.” “Yes, but that negativity prevents bad plans as much as good ones. That”
― Giles Foden, Turbulence

“It is terrible the way you think time is going to change you. The way you think of some future time when things will be all right. And all that happens is that you drop back into the previous stream of time and it closes over your head.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“you just can’t use averages to predict the specifics of the next generation of eddies, any more than you could use an average to predict the life-story of an individual human being.”
― Giles Foden, Turbulence

“It is the bad spirit that has come over this place. My grandmother says that it will only go away when you see a dog and a goat riding a bicycle together.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“I have a sensation of losing track of time. In front of me, the mountain floats up with the swell. Drifts away amid tendrils of mist. And then comes back into sight.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“I’ve come to this conclusion, on the rustling of the dried leaf skirts. It’s like a form of vagueness that lets you imagine things, only you hear it.”
― Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland

“The young can be so unreasonable in what they expect from”
― Giles Foden, Turbulence

“The process of measurement must have a beginning and end. The establishment of those points has an effect on the outcome.”
― Giles Foden, Turbulence

“Ryman himself said—all mistakes proceed from initial conditions.”
― Giles Foden, Turbulence