Imraan Coovadia Quotes & Sayings

They put exclusively black history in the syllabus. Is there a difference between a black history of the world and a proper history? They say children must read black novels. Does a novel have a skin colour? — Imraan Coovadia

He would only admit a word, or an action, into a play when it satisfied some internal ruler. He made sure everything counted. — Imraan Coovadia

Ann put the oven to heat. She washed the lamb under the tap, turning it around to clean the entire leg. Then it was dried with a paper towel, stretched out on the cutting board to be hammered flat, and rubbed with salt and rosemary she took from the kitchen window. She waited for the oven to reach two hundred. The cleaned scent of the meat and the clatter of the water in the skink, the branches of rosemary, the dogs finding each other's ears in the evening, the children being called indoors, servants standing on the road for the Indian bus, and the rising heat of the oven against the remaining heat of the day made her aware of her own happiness. This happiness was like the sea wind when the temperature of the water and the land reversed and everything was free in new darkness. — Imraan Coovadia

Everybody wished to confess, not to admit anything. The sins they remembered, before the end of the world, were general rather than particular. Nobody even knew how to tell the time. Banks of computers around the planet were predicted to crash when the end of the millennium arrived. All the machinery dependent on electronic calculation would go: jumbo jets and atomic power plants, satellites and radio stations, nuclear submarines beneath the ice caps and the stock exchange in New York. Each sin demanded to be told to its full extent before the day arrived. The culprits counted them out one after the other, arriving at a total just as if they were finding the sums of the cents in their hands. But there was no simple way to measure sin. — Imraan Coovadia

Mr Shabangu stood for a system, fixed in place, in which you knew how to measure who and what was important. — Imraan Coovadia

We get most of our energy from complications. — Imraan Coovadia

You listened for the rapping on the door, which might come in the early hours of the morning, and tried to think if there was anything you had missed. You went upstairs again and checked the shelves and made sure that any entries in the telephone book had been scratched out. It was impossible to live without leaving clues. Suddenly, as if a knife was buried in you up to the hilt, you yearned for life in an ordinary country, ordinary happiness and unhappiness. — Imraan Coovadia

I believe, Sebastian, that novels are more important than ever. They are more important than video recorders and record players and television because they enable us to exercise our minds. They allow us to step back and see where the history is taking us. — Imraan Coovadia

Only monsters could slay monsters. — Imraan Coovadia

It was a harbinger of the metric system. — Imraan Coovadia

So this is our drama. He's in love with her. She's in love with me. I am in love with myself. We have a merry triangle going. — Imraan Coovadia

They waited for the bill. On the borders there were new guerrilla armies. The rouble and the dollar had replaced the pound sterling. The kilometre and the kilogram and the litre were new ways of measuring miles and imperial pounds and fluid ounces. In Zaire, Patrice Lumumba had been murdered on the instruction of the White House. They wanted to expel her son for possessing two bottles of brandy. The measurements made by Curzon College were as outdated as yards and inches. They didn't know what counted. — Imraan Coovadia

You're telling stories again. You have the disease of telling stories, Roland. — Imraan Coovadia