Dara B

“It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello

“Aunt Fostalina says when she first came to America she went to school during the day and worked nights at Eliot’s hotels, cleaning hotel rooms together with people from countries like Senegal, Cameroon, Tibet, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and so on. It was like the damn United Nations there, she likes to say.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

“...and the women spread their ntsaroz and sit on one side, the men on the other, like they are two different rivers that are not supposed to meet.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

“...we can pretend that the book in question is not Mr. West’s but mine, made mine by the madness of my reading.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello