Andre Brink Quotes & Sayings

My library was
all libraries are
a place of ultimate refuge, a wild and sacred space where meanings are manageable precisely because they aren't binding; and where illusion is comfortingly real. — Andre Brink

Ouma Nella's quotes p 144 -146
"Man, if you don't know where you going, any road will bring you there."
"It don't matter how far a river run. It never forget where it come from. That is all that is important."
"No matter if it's wet or dry," she grunt. "As long as you keep a green branch in your heart, there will always be a bird that come to sing in it."
"It's no use crying in the rain, my child, because no one will see your tears.
"Don't think you can climb two trees at the same time just because you got two legs."
"Ouma Nella, where am I not?"
"But you're right here with me, Philida. So there's many places where you're not."
"Tell me where those places are. I got to know. So I can go and look for myself. — Andre Brink

How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.
Alone. Alone to the very end. I ... every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world? — Andre Brink

I can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it - but I can never be on the inside of it with you. I cannot even be sure whether I really know what it is like. Is it 'like' my own? Or incomparable? Just as I can never know if what you see at any given moment is exactly the same as what I see. We look at a colour. We both call it red. But it is only because we have been taught to call it by that name. There is no guarantee - not ever - that we see it in the same way, that your red is my red. — Andre Brink

I was born on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in the early spring of 1960. — Andre Brink

Everything one used to take for granted, with so much certainty that one never even bothered to enquire about it, now turns out to be illusion. Your certainties are proven lies. And what happens if you start probing? Must you learn a wholly new language first?
'Humanity'. Normally one uses it as a synonym for compassion; charity; decency; integrity. 'He is such a human person.' Must one now go in search of an entirely different set of synonyms: cruelty; exploitation; unscrupulousness; or whatever? — Andre Brink

When the conspiracy of lies surrounding me demands of me to silence the one word of truth given to me, that word becomes the one word I wish to utter above all others. — Andre Brink

To respect the dignity of a relationship also implies accepting the end when it comes. Except in my mind, except in my dreams, where the aftertaste of her still lingers. — Andre Brink

A country can't love you. At most it may need you. It's much the same as people. — Andre Brink

As Alan Paton said, 'Ah but your fucking land is beautiful'. — Andre Brink

But for Mozart love is only the litmus test. To determine whether one is truly free or not. — Andre Brink

Sometimes, in one of his more exuberant or desperate moods, Pa would go out in the veld and sprinkle brandy on the daisies to make them drunk so that they wouldn't feel the pain of shrivelling up and dying. — Andre Brink

In love, no question is ever preposterous. — Andre Brink

If I speak with a character's voice it is because that character's become so much part of me that ... I think I have the right then to imagine myself into the skin, into the life, into the dreams, into the experience of the particular character that I've chosen. — Andre Brink

Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew nothing about it. — Andre Brink