Damon Galgut > Quotes

“If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“As she starts to read, the book travels into her from a long distance, from his mind to mine, across a gap in time, and now she’s not in the room any more, she’s inside the sentences, one joined to the next like a series of tunnels, connected to each other at angles.”
― Damon Galgut, The promise

“In his clearest moments he thinks he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“As a result, he is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is never going towards something, always away, away”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“Forgive me my friend, I tried to hold on, but you fell, you fell”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“What happens in a room lingers there invisibly, all deeds, all words, always. Not seen, not heard, except by some, and even then imperfectly. In this very room both birth and death have taken place. Long ago, maybe, but the blood is still visible on certain days, when time wears thin.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“then he’s gone. She can hear him walking away up the passage. His footsteps sound hesitant, but he doesn’t turn back. Nor will the moment return, which is true of all moments, though not equally.”
― Damon Galgut, The promise

“There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“The funny thing is, I don't care too much. You think you love something so badly, but when it's gone you find out you don't care so much.”
― Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor

“He has always had a dread of crossing borders, he doesn't like to leave what's known and safe for the blank space beyond in which anything can happen. Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you're moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“Odd how certain people, often random individuals, can pulse with significance in your thoughts, your dreams”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“Foolish old earth, returning and repeating itself, over and over. Never misses a show. How can you bear it, you ancient tart, giving the identical performance again and again, evenings and matinées, while the theatre crumbles around you, the lines in the script unchanging, to say nothing of the make-up, the costumes, the extravagant gestures … Tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after that …”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“A human figure approaching, filling itself in slowly, putting on age and sex and race, like items of clothing, till she's looking at a black boy, also thirteen years old, wearing ragged shorts and T-shirt, broken takkies on his feet.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.”
― Damon Galgut, The Impostor

“She feels ugly when she cries, like a tomato breaking open,”
― Damon Galgut, The promise

“A human figure approaching, filling itself in slowly, putting on age and sex and race, like items of clothing,”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“Past a certain point, maybe, a person's character defines itself and stays fixed in your mind.”
― Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor

“Waiting in respectful silence is an essential part of the job and he has developed the capacity to simulate deep calm while experiencing none of it. In his core, Mervyn Glass is a frantic man.”
― Damon Galgut, The promise

“Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It's just the living part we still have to work out.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“...if you are names without a nature, it's not because I don't remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it's for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there's only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it's all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of life.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“You understand, he says, people don't always take what you give to them. Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“No emotion was supposed to cross the great divide of class. Affection could erase all hierarchy; in this was the danger, and the delight.”
― Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer

“What he sensed more than anything else was kindness – a kindness of a human and immediate sort. It was surprising how very radical this simple emotion could be.”
― Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer

“The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason. Understanding made sadness easier to bear.”
― Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer

“Oh, i can deal with the tragedy, it's the farce I can't handle.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“That echo. It played in his head at unexpected moments, repeating certain sounds and making nonsense of them. But could you remember an echo? Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself.”
― Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer