Peter Abrahams Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 37 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Peter Abrahams.
Famous Quotes By Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 2098233 Peter Abrahams Quotes 2098233](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-2098233.jpg)
Most of the black women who lived in the lower end of Vrededorp came from the countryside and were there to be near their menfolk who worked in the mines. They spoke neither English nor Afrikaans. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1459717 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1459717](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1459717.jpg)
There is a qualitative difference between being a minority and being a majority. Majorities are stronger under psychological pressure because numbers count. But only if they are aware of it. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 295256 Peter Abrahams Quotes 295256](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-295256.jpg)
The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 542732 Peter Abrahams Quotes 542732](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-542732.jpg)
The words dripped on my consciousness, sank into my being, and carried me away to the magic long ago of once upon a time. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1769230 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1769230](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1769230.jpg)
In the Caribbean islands, especially in Jamaica, have I found a country similar to South Africa plus the racial freedom I had sought so long. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 2063840 Peter Abrahams Quotes 2063840](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-2063840.jpg)
My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 967817 Peter Abrahams Quotes 967817](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-967817.jpg)
We do not ask the right questions when we are young, so we miss the important answers. Now it is too late to ask, too late for the illuminating answers, and the unanswered questions haunt us for a lifetime. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1299800 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1299800](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1299800.jpg)
My mother went to work in the homes of white folk, usually living in and looking after their children. The money was small. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 375044 Peter Abrahams Quotes 375044](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-375044.jpg)
What do you get out of hating people, out of having this bitterness in your heart always? — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1059659 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1059659](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1059659.jpg)
The only places where I have found that simple human dignity, that respect for the other man, and the gracious feel of tolerance and humanity have not been either among the heroes of the class-struggle or the 'thinking men' but among my simple 'backward' people. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1946571 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1946571](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1946571.jpg)
All my life had been dominated by a sign, often invisible but no less real for that, which said: 'Reserved for Europeans Only.' — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1379051 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1379051](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1379051.jpg)
The London I entered was a great bustling metropolitan city at war, an imperial power fighting to hold on to that empire. And the teeming colonial subjects of that empire did not, on the whole, want England to lose that war, but they also did not want the empire to emerge unchanged from it. This, for very many of us, was the hard dilemma. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1347413 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1347413](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1347413.jpg)
Positive social awareness among the South African educated half-caste is zero. Teaching is a mechanical job. The best way of earning a living. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1427149 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1427149](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1427149.jpg)
Tribal man is not an individual in the western sense. Psychologically and emotionally, he is the present living personification of a number of forces, among the most important of which are the ancestral dead. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1329898 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1329898](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1329898.jpg)
Many have changed so much that they have lost the magic of the dream that carried them on their own bootstraps. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1856167 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1856167](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1856167.jpg)
You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1489522 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1489522](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1489522.jpg)
You see, love is strong. Stronger than hate even. Love is the only thing that can kill hate, nothing else. You see, hate destroys and that's why love is stronger. It builds. There is hope for all the colored people in this country while one white woman can love one colored man. Love keeps one alive. It makes you understan and fight... — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1111963 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1111963](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1111963.jpg)
Must simplicity and humanity go under in the interest of progress? What is the most important component of civilization - is it human or mechanical? Must thought processes become involved and insincere? Must the class-struggle warp those who are involved in it? — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1985532 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1985532](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1985532.jpg)
To get where you want to go you can't only do what you like. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1988894 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1988894](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1988894.jpg)
They say life is all about connecting, like that's a good thing. But when brain and eyes are lining up you know different. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 2196388 Peter Abrahams Quotes 2196388](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-2196388.jpg)
For me, personally, life in South Africa had come to an end. I had been lucky in some of the whites I had met. Meeting them had made a straight 'all-blacks-are-good, all-whites-are-bad' attitude impossible. But I had reached a point where the gestures of even my friends among the whites were suspect, so I had to go or be forever lost. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1200947 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1200947](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1200947.jpg)
To live with the conscious knowledge of the shadow of uncertainty, with the knowledge that disaster or tragedy could strike at any time; to be afraid and to know and acknowledge your fear, and still to live creatively and with unstinting love: that is to live with grace. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1188387 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1188387](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1188387.jpg)
The racism of the Nazis threatened to make whatever we had experienced look like child's play. If they could be so brutal to the Jews, what would they do to the blacks? So large numbers of black young men and women rallied to the defence of the empire. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1113652 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1113652](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1113652.jpg)
I attended school regularly for three years. I learned to read and write. 'Lamb's Tales' from Shakespeare was my favourite reading matter. I stole, by finding, Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury.' These two books, and the 'Everyman' edition of John Keats, were my proudest and dearest possessions, my greatest wealth. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 216674 Peter Abrahams Quotes 216674](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-216674.jpg)
In East, South and Central Africa, the minority manipulated the majority into believing the minority was the majority, that there were more whites in the world than blacks; instilled in the blacks a sense of inferiority, inadequacy, worthlessness. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1076326 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1076326](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1076326.jpg)
Perhaps life had a meaning that transcended race and colour. If it had, I could not find it in South Africa. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 1040578 Peter Abrahams Quotes 1040578](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-1040578.jpg)
Ingrid shrugged ... like Marie Antoinette hearing about the starving peasants. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 986751 Peter Abrahams Quotes 986751](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-986751.jpg)
With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 902844 Peter Abrahams Quotes 902844](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-902844.jpg)
Being born white in South Africa or anywhere in the empire and Commonwealth automatically conferred this special status. You had no problem finding a place to live, a job, trade union membership, access to social services. Being white, speaking English, you were accepted as English, entitled to all the rights of citizenship. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 820743 Peter Abrahams Quotes 820743](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-820743.jpg)
Marxism, communism, socialism - the ideologies - did not have the automatic answers to the problem of the relations between the lighter and darker races of mankind. They did not even have an answer to anti-Semitism. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 586968 Peter Abrahams Quotes 586968](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-586968.jpg)
You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer
history shows it's better if you're not
but you have to understand your badness. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 585180 Peter Abrahams Quotes 585180](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-585180.jpg)
A man can submit today in order to resist tomorrow. My submission had been such. And because I had not been free to show my real feeling, to voice my true thoughts, my submission had bred bitterness and anger. And there were nearly ten million others who had submitted with equal anger and bitterness. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 582804 Peter Abrahams Quotes 582804](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-582804.jpg)
Mom had the kind of love for her that you could feel, like it was part of the atmosphere — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 512694 Peter Abrahams Quotes 512694](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-512694.jpg)
I don't want anything now, Sarie thought, not a thing in the world. I have everything I want. Yesterday I wanted so much without knowing what. Today I've got everything... — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 446838 Peter Abrahams Quotes 446838](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-446838.jpg)
To get from people you had to give a piece of yourself, a real piece that mattered. — Peter Abrahams
![Peter Abrahams Quotes 287108 Peter Abrahams Quotes 287108](https://quotessayings.net/pics/peter-abrahams-quote-287108.jpg)
I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me. — Peter Abrahams