Abigail George Quotes & Sayings

For years you've been laying a table for one. — Abigail George

Autumn leaves snap and crackle
Seasons carry gravity,
Burdens, dreams,
Seeing and things. — Abigail George

To me she was beautiful, this artist's model, this film extra, a woman who had been married three times. I think she would understand my chronic illness, my fatigue, and me. I think we would be best friends or pen pals. — Abigail George

At the end of the sky I am a swimmer. In the water I can become a child again, splashing, sighing, holding my breath until enough is enough, I come up choking, my lungs needful of a fresh supply of air. — Abigail George

I never touched drink. It uproots you. Plants you some place you will never remember the morning after. — Abigail George

I love reading. It has taught me many things. I have learned how to bridge the gap between both genders and age. Separation anxiety and psychoanalysing myself. Between youth and adulthood. It takes a lifetime for some people to fully grasp how wonderful it is just to accept the friendship of someone who is older than you or younger than you. You will always learn something new and that is always how the game of life is played. You do not have to be an intellectual to realise that this moment in time for any generation you will always be caught between pitching your tent, finding that perfect picnic spot, realising that you are perpetually caught between being the frosting on top of the cake and the Everest. — Abigail George

Like the wide hollows of eyes marked in cathedrals of stone that left me half-perplexed as a child. A self-portrait of an innocent in this organic of ephemeral societies. Then I know I will be able to flourish viciously. That's the trouble with remembering. You begin to wish. — Abigail George

The light a sun. When I was a child, I thought that sleep came with darkness. When I grew older, I took long naps in the glare of the afternoon sunlight. The darkness was my enemy. Daylight was a triumph. — Abigail George

I'm free in Jesus mighty name. I'm free. He casts out every sadness. Every burden. Every wounded transgression. He washes away my sins. — Abigail George

Having a sibling means you always have a best friend for life. — Abigail George

Yes, the ugliness of humanity can destroy you, it can lead to your destruction, you can sabotage others unknowingly or self-sabotage yourself and in the end, you will learn to secretly despise yourself and despise others at the same time. People never talk about what comes with freedom. The price of freedom. The lives that were lost in the process of its beautiful acquisition. They do not seem to realise that in the wrong hands it was a commodity for generations. People were lynched for it. They were raped for it. Nasty things (instead people will say let us sign papers and treaties and draw up constitutions). The bits and pieces of history become the literally and figuratively the past. Change yourself and you will change the past's 'yolk of blood'. — Abigail George

We can be blind to our own faults. Our own flaws. They call it being human. The universe or whatever you want to call it. I call it human nature. The origins of smoke and mirrors. — Abigail George

In this rural wasteland I feel I am not myself. — Abigail George

To be a mother is some kind of amazing. Something really amazing — Abigail George

I am home for good like a tiny shoot. The tiny shoots in my mother's garden. I have a passion for idle chatter about books, language and literature. Preparing a meal together, that can be romantic. — Abigail George

They parade for us
In zoos - in portraits
Of every generation. — Abigail George

Lost in a world of
reaching.
My heart is formidable
I am still breathing. — Abigail George

I am too good at making you see what you want to see. It has been hard my whole life to make that picture seem so perfect. The perfect daughter in the perfect family who was after all not so perfect. There was again only the illusion of what outsiders wanted to see. — Abigail George

Arching her back towards him. Her slender arms, legs, waist enfolded by his arms. His warm and authentic embrace. That was how I came into this world. Love. Isn't love the only answer for every simple thing that is sympathetic and creative in this world. Everything that is good in the family way.
Everything that is blessed. The pursuit of happiness and loveliness. — Abigail George

God simply faded into the background like our toys, into the distant past. And the memories of Sunday roasts with pudding and custard. — Abigail George

Nice people sometimes finish last but they are always the winners who take it all in the end. — Abigail George

The logic of damage. There is often no explanation for it. — Abigail George

We only live in a perfect world when we find ourselves challenging ourselves when it comes to listening to other people's opinions and accepting it, understanding it as limited thinking. A kind of flawed thinking. — Abigail George

That whole family is incestuous and all of them mean to keep me out of their circle. — Abigail George

Like water our ideals for writing what seems at first to be a calling to pen a masterpiece, it at first can be pure, fluid even (words can come easily) but we also have to learn to work with what our eyes glaze over as weak substitutes, words that we think have no substance to what we are learning towards. What is every poet's intention? Their intention is to forge, nullify, create, defend, fill the reader with the awe and inspiration that every poet themselves craves. They want to carve a name for themselves in the annals of history, leave a not so quiet legacy behind. Poets want immortality or rather they want their words to become immortal. Perhaps even Marlowe and Shakespeare had discussions about this. — Abigail George

Except now everything is digital even murder. There is a record for everything under the sun from the moon and back whether we like it or not. The image that I have of the future is that it is very bleak. It is darkness visible. The black dog of depression will hang us all in the end. Considering the life we live, the values we teach our children, what we believe in everything is a movement for change and every pause between words is a revolutionary act. The 'struggle' was like a painful mental illness. The liberation in retrospect was either the exit from our slavery ushering us into a novel, brave, bold and brilliant world or a mass hallucination. The political climate in post-apartheid South Africa has gone as far as corrupting liberty. — Abigail George

If I trace its breaking point I come across the eternity of the primitive impulse. The sea river is a cold impasse. Will I find secrets there? In my dream I am standing on a frozen lake, the second sex and I can hear female voices all around me. — Abigail George

If I were an alcoholic, a raging alcoholic, I would drink all my sorrows away. Sadness to me reminds me of Hemingway driving ambulances in the war. No way out. Sadness reminds me of Monroe. No way out. — Abigail George

I stand alone, a woman, a girl, and a child.
Unsuccessful at my first attempts of a poem
I am miserable when I fail. — Abigail George

You're staring blankly at the fifties now. I'm thirty-ish. Once you were my teacher, my master and I was your student, your apprentice. College years long gone and a decade between us. I think of you every winter and my heart still stops dead, my mouth opening and shutting as if you were still here. I lost something when I found you, something ancient. — Abigail George

War and peace. There are blurred lines in the realities of both. A separation anxiety as the paradigm shifts from the air that a sniper wears on his face (real life, entertainment for the masses or the propaganda machine you decide), to the blueprint of an assassination in a driveway (Chris Hani lying in a pool of his own blood). You know that we cannot eat stones but we can burn, butcher, necklace, murder, forcibly remove and displace entire families, races of different faiths in the name of apartheid. Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and Chris Hani instruments of change, war, tolerance or peace. The Romantics got it right before anyone else did. Truth is beauty. The truth is South Africa is not cool anymore. — Abigail George

Writing will never be perfect in a poet's eye that is why we need people's criticism good or bad, whether or not it gives a positive or negative frame to our work. We are first at hand to fight against the real and the normal in our writing as our outspoken, brimming voice bring truths to light so vividly and intensely for mass consumption that we so long for in our hearts. When the poet, not jubilant, neither spirited, allows his mind to quiet, allows the survival of and realises that all figures of speech matters; when God has witnessed the culmination of his progress; when the writer is almost in a hypnotic stance. Then the poet cannot stop himself when he is in the right place, then he can guess at the intensity, the prowess of his pen, his prolific writing and the intelligence behind his words becomes a self portrait kind of like what Vincent van Gogh used to do when he was depressed and lonely, fighting against the feelings of isolation and rejection by the establishment. — Abigail George

I want to talk about how I survived. It is not a long story. It is only a few pages long. It started with the word 'winter'. — Abigail George

Only later I felt that poetry is like feeling another person lying next to you in the dark. Do you believe in poetry, in the spirit of poetry? I could see poetry in ballads, in the picture of the cathedral on the back of the postcard that my father sent my mother from London, in glaciers, peaks of mountains, river dust, Ian McEwan's covers of his books, cheap thrillers. Running gave me a gravitational pull. Running was my mother love. I was barefoot. There I was dressed in white. Matchstick legs. Hair standing up. I did not feel like a zero. I did not feel like a lost oar, unloved and unwanted, like a plant that needed water. A fleet of paper ships that needed to be mourned. I often felt homesick for the country of my mother. — Abigail George

I write about him to make the ghost stories go away. Everything that haunts me. — Abigail George

Life has hurt me. When life hurts you, which way do you go, up or down? When life hurts you what happens to a healthy body, a healthy mind? They gradually, gradually diminish. Evaporate. There was a false self. A Peter who believed in his power, that he could dominate any situation that he found himself in, that he could smoke and drink and be one of the guys but also a Lothario. — Abigail George

Tin-Tin in your rattle skin
Dumbed and worn down -
Flushed pink-salmon suffering. — Abigail George

Are you in need of company?
Little by little -
Wind carries leaves. — Abigail George

Do ghosts have to be forgiven? All I remember of the funeral is, 'Your husband was a brilliant man.' Was that all the comfort that I had to draw on? I wanted to announce, 'Yes he was a brilliant man and now like all the great minds he is dead.' Sometimes I cry myself to sleep, sniffling, stifling my sobs in my pillows. Sometimes I fall asleep the minute my head hits the pillow and find my arms reaching across the other side of the bed for Kenny so I can whisper sweet nothings in his ear as he falls asleep.

I reached out for the bottle of sleeping tablets on my bedside table and swallowed them one by one. — Abigail George

Delay
The warmth
Of the smooth rocks
In the sun

Ripples
On the surface
Of pools in the surf
And on the beach

The rush
Of colour
In every destination
The uninterrupted flight plan

Vanishing acts
Flashbacks and passages
Rare appearances of family
The timeless dance

The swift motion
Of the perfect match
Of leaves against grass
Chameleon-like and provocative

This season is festive
Uncomplicated
Filled with high hopes
A portrait of a family

My demands are small
Summer is when you'll be home
From school
More grown up than before. — Abigail George

Children are never mistakes. They might not all have been conceived in life but they are never mistakes. — Abigail George

I don't drive to places where I want to go. My mother takes me or my brother. — Abigail George

Always remember. It takes one person to start a movement. — Abigail George

It is easy to lose hope when all is lost. We do not realise that is just the beginning. That is just the catalyst. That is when we have to spread our wings like a butterfly. The rainy days will come but so will 'the botanical drawings' of life. Of kitchen tables, our mother's apron strings, cabbage roses and toys if we want to become the women our mother's were. There are so many careers for women to choose from today. Wherever they find themselves women will always find an abundance. — Abigail George

I sprayed scent like a saga a little too anxiously, left the porridge burnt at the bottom of the pot that morning: oats. Now I am swimming for my life while my sister in another city reaches for her umbrella next to her front door. I can smell the rosemary chicken but I don't want any feasts. — Abigail George

Bessie shifted with the passage of time, with the dial of a clock. I lay here wishing you were here, but you're not. The symbiosis of this relationship is incomplete. He stirred in his sleep, put his arm around her waist and breathed deeply in his sleep. She imagined that he was finally in all these weeks speaking to her, that recognition was there now - he was dead to her but not to another woman. — Abigail George

You will not always be happy but I guarantee it that you will always be lucky as an artist when you least expect it. — Abigail George

Happiness is greatest when shared with a sibling or a child. — Abigail George

In his eyes I forget time, burnt diaries, midnight, and ballads. I forget that I am growing older. One day I will be an old woman. — Abigail George

Pain is like a storm. Falling in love is like a storm. Obesity is like a storm. One day it is there and the next day it is still there. — Abigail George

The winter in Johannesburg only come out to play at the weekend, in the evenings during the week, especially in a Friday night. They go out for drinks but during the day they work their fingers to the bone like gulls never-ending swooping through the air. Their heads are like radios filled with links to music, drama and news. When men wounded them, break their hearts, leave them still smitten or stone cold it feels like a jab with a knife to their spirit. — Abigail George

Where is my language? You're a kind soul and deserve everything of the best for all of your future tomorrows. — Abigail George

As George Orwell said, it is not easy to become sane. For South Africa, perhaps it will take as many lifetimes as we have tried to put between the present and the Dutch East India Company. There are many minds if you take a good look. Eventually in the same way the measure of loss and grief does, karma will catch up with all of us. Post-apartheid South Africa is not more enlightened than her sister apartheid South Africa. You may know nothing but tell me what you feel when you think, see, act, respond and sense. What corresponds with thought, sight, action, response and your intuition? (The warrior plunders on) racism is especially a majority shareholder at all levels. We forget that it is a privilege to live in a post-apartheid South Africa. — Abigail George

Do you want to change lives? Do you really want to change the world? Then read. Read as much as you can, as widely as you can and don't forget to read what you like. Most of all read what you love. There is power in that. — Abigail George

I give my life as a sacrifice. — Abigail George

I used to like wolves; they always arrived so
Punctually in sheep's clothing at the mortuary
To be prepared for burial by my father who
Showered his wrath on my mother with blows
From his fists at night; this warrior, this Lord — Abigail George

There is humanity in all of us and not just the illusion of it. — Abigail George

I have a man, she said. And my man tall and good-looking. What have you? Nothing that I can see. — Abigail George

Does this mean that men evolve faster than women do, would we ever live in an integrated society where the sexes would be equal? The bewildered self is unchanging. Men are unchanging when it comes top sex. Inertia. That would be the first word to describe my personality. Frightened and confused when it comes to sex, sensuality and the sexual transaction. Men will give you money to go away. Men do not want you to make trouble for them. I poured myself into After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. I poured myself into Jean Rhys' novels and I saw more than sadness, suffering, losing youth there. I saw human rights. The men perhaps had all the power because they had the money but who was the greater, the woman or the man with her beguiling attractiveness, her youthful appeal, her attractiveness. — Abigail George

Bridges burned and pages turned with every tear that fell from my eyes. — Abigail George

People break all the time, no lie there and when that wretched break happens something is usually lost, left behind confused or some is hurt, a member of the family, a child, pure and innocent of the cruel world, dangerous adult men and women. — Abigail George

Gulls fly overhead
While waves slap against rocks
From dusk till dawn. — Abigail George

I imagined him standing there looking at my shadow or over my shoulder and could only promise my soul this. That he was with someone more suitable now. — Abigail George

I would dream of birds and flora, beasts and cave dwellers. Every childhood night was a broken night. My sister escaped. For a while, my brother did too (extraordinarily). — Abigail George

What it takes to build muscle in a mysterious, intriguing world. You weave the awful, the terrible things that happened to you as a child into a story. — Abigail George

I've become obsessed with my weight. How I look in clothes (do they fit well or not at all). I'm unhappy on so many levels. How do I look today, or in the photograph, am I smiling nicely with my teeth or unsmiling with no show of teeth. Am I well (meaning happy, content with my lot in life) or am I not well (in need of rest, renewal and rejuvenation). Have I made a new friend today or have I lost someone towards the journey to truth and light. — Abigail George

At the end of the day, whether we find ourselves in the autumn of our years or not, we will all become infirm in the end but we should never let it limit our thinking. — Abigail George

Poets must be grounded in the education of the arts, drama, history, mysticism, esotericism, and philosophy. To gain knowledge and become learned of the above is easy - read. Poets should apply this knowledge to their work, so a poet will advance to the next level, to their next phase of their emotional, psychological and spiritual development, growing in years in a short space of time, in hours or months if he or she is an avid reader. This knowledge will birth work that is not meretricious but of noble parentage. — Abigail George

Wanderlust. These are words that I associate with him now. Not genius. Not gifted. Extraordinary in any way. — Abigail George

Do all romantic notions and inclinations wither, sag and die as you grew older into the body of a woman who begins to resemble your mother's and then your grandmother's? — Abigail George

This body did not live for me. — Abigail George

Poetry invades loneliness in a way that nothing else can. I thought that if I changed that people, beautiful people, arrogant people, narcissists, intellectuals, readers, teachers, spiritual gurus would come into my life but they did not. I am still rowing my boat ashore. It still feels like Hiroshima out there. — Abigail George

I am hurting. The tears don't come anymore. They don't have the guts to anymore. I know that if I fail at that, it will mean the death of me. — Abigail George

This is the same establishment that all those who want, or rather aspire to, to be literary figures of the century, artists, painters and sculptors want acceptance from and approval. They want to be looked up to. Young and upcoming poets must approach their craft with an almost angelic perspective. So many writers are missing a condensed fusion in their writing, they condescend to their audience, the truth is not spoken in their work, they gabble, their words seem to make a hot fuss on the page. What do they gain? They gain this, simply nothing. Poets must assemble and present their work accordingly to how they see fit and should be careful of advice from other writers and editors. Sometimes there can be too much going on in the words that are meant to be given with the best of intentions. — Abigail George

I write in code. — Abigail George

Youth. Murder (Biko). Slavery. Freedom. We are all creatures of ignorance at the end of the day. The natural order of the hierarchy of life states that we are creatures. Creatures of habit whether it is normal (following the status quo and all of that jazz). Creatures of marching orders and almost sanitary routine. Creatures of the abnormal. Our leaders are coldly obliterating the past. It is impossible to destroy nations, tribes, individuals without their permission. Many lessons learned from the past come to life like the connect the dots game of a child in a museum. We are swift to forget history. Bury the past like yesterday's newspaper, our infirm and elderly in nursing homes. — Abigail George

Fresh from memory
Caught in poverty
There is a web that lies beneath it all. — Abigail George

Whenever I feel lonely I remembered those days. My mother walking ahead of me, barefoot, her hair blowing in the wind, across her mouth, a pair of her soft shoes in her hand, yet she still looked beautiful and elegant to me. Her glasses perched on the end of her nose. — Abigail George

Grovelling then busking
All at once
And all in time
Leaving a Ferris-wheel trail
Across a deep mountainous climb
Descended with rapture and with joy
Their mindless triumphant demeanour
Gossamer wings parade-parade
These gormless little ants
Full to the brimful
Empty to the last meandering weight
Pulled across the
Rotting fruit filled with retiring goodness
Tiny prissy princelings
These masterful creatures
Filled with adventuring spirit
March on, march on
Under the forgiving human's
Watchful, waiting and wandering eye. — Abigail George