Quotes by South African Authors - Page 2

Nowhere can we get to know the holiness of God and come under His influence and power except in the inner chamber. It has been well said: "No man can expect to make progress in holiness who is not often and long alone with God."
Andrew Murray
When we pray for the Spirit's help ... we will simply fall down at the Lord's feet in our weakness. There we will find the victory and power that comes from His love.
Andrew Murray
While others still slept He went away to pray and to renew His strength in communion with His Father. He had need of this otherwise He would not have been ready for the new day. The holy work of delivering souls demands constant renewal through fellowship with God.
Andrew Murray
Abiding fully means praying much.
Andrew Murray
We firmly believe that therapy is education rather than healing that it is growth rather than treatment.
Arnold Lazarus
The prime goal is to alleviate suffering and not to prolong life. And if your treatment does not alleviate suffering but only prolongs life that treatment should be stopped.
Christian Barnard
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Abba Eban
Happiness ... is achieved only by making others happy.
Stuart Cloete
Africa has her mysteries and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them.
Miriam Makeba
We bear the world and we make it. ... There was never a great man who had not a great mother-it is hardly an exaggeration.
Olive Schreiner
There is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others and comforting those that are sad.
Olive Schreiner
I think if I were dying and I heard of an act of injustice it would start me up to a moment's life again.
Olive Schreiner
There are only two things that are absolute realities love and knowledge and you can't escape them.
Olive Schreiner
There is nothing ridiculous in love.
Olive Schreiner
Life has ... taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors. She taught me to seek sustenance from the endeavor itself but to leave the result to God.
Alan Paton
When men are ruled by fear they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it.
Alan Paton
Organized religion is making Christianity political rather than making politics Christian.
Laurens van der Post
The harder you work the luckier you get.
Gary Player
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.
Olive Schreiner
They tell us variety is the spice of life - and yet diversity terrifies them.
Christina Engela
It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.” And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, “Treblinka – 100% human stereate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is
J.M. Coetzee
He who makes fun of a short and fat man’s weight is much less cruel than he who makes fun of his height.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Human rights protection laws typically come under attack from those who made these laws necessary to begin with.
Christina Engela
Those who object to human rights protection laws typically do so because they want to be above those laws.
Christina Engela
Never wish for someone else's life because you never know if they also wish yours was theirs.
Gugu Mona
Of what earthly use were novels? How did they help anybody?
Damon Galgut
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
It is better to wait until you get the right thing, at the right time and in the right place; than to race for the wrong thing, at the wrong time and in the wrong place, for it yields nothing but disgrace.
Gift Gugu Mona
Oh! Lord should I forget anything, never let me forget that without you I am nothing.
Gift Gugu Mona
Ninth Floorshe ran across the parquet slipped the flokati matcrashed the windownoshe stood at the window prism looked up at sky bruise nightspread hernoshe tilted dived swanning spinningtip-toed ink air broke fingers firstnoshe climbed the small gap the window gavehung her finger joints clotted the view with frightened breathfell ligament torn and sorrynoshe wandered to the glass hatch to watch tranquilised lights sputteringleaned too hard fell faster than a bottle of Jacknothis is how it was:drunk screaming she crashed the parquet with griefroared the ungiving window frames which gaveshe spangled spaghetti-like ribbon-voicedstreet lights crashed on herno.She did nothing.
Karin Schimke
Just saying "I love you" can mean the difference between nothing and everything. Some people say it while they stab the person they say it to - some say it to the one holding the knife.
Christina Engela
A killer is someone who killed another without their country’s permission.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are all 'foreigners' to [the remainder of: the human race minus our countrymen].
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
South Africa is the only country where an overwhelming majority in complete political control is apparently so threatened by a tiny minority that they need racist affirmative action policies to protect the majority by legislatively excluding the minority totally from the job market.
Christina Engela
Today is the best time to do what you couldn't do yesterday, because tomorrow might be too late.
Gift Gugu Mona
Insurance companies sell what might happen tomorrow. Historians sell what certainly happened yesterday.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A praiseworthy King is he who doesn't seek the most expensive throne, rather the most effective leadership style.
Gugu Mona
Great leaders make an impact with limited resources and inefficient leaders cannot yield good returns even with abundant resources.
Gugu Mona
A model is an actor without a voice.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Whatever you say or do, remember there's always someone watching you.
Gift Gugu Mona
Remember that it is quicker to destroy than build, so be careful of what you do even with your own tongue.
Gift Gugu Mona
So I am not exactly sure what I imagine and what I remember. Is there a difference? Not much, if you ask me.
Harry Kalmer
When you understand the power of praise, you can't waste precious time on cursing the enemy, but rather be steadfast in praising God for the guaranteed victories. After all there is no essence in fighting battles that are won already.
Gugu Mona
You are privileged if you know that there is God, the only creator of Heaven and Earth because not everyone gets to understand that whist still alive.
Gugu Mona
Speaking one’s mind once is more honorable than quoting a thousand men.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In today's society conformity is more of a necessity than an option.
Johan Coetzer
Tracey hurriedly shut the door behind her to prevent the flames that had been licking hungrily at her caboose all the way down the corridor, from following her inside. Then, almost falling into one of the gravity couches, she hurriedly strapped herself into it before punching the emergency release. She hoped the escape system still worked. It did. The explosive dead-bolts fired, shaking the pod loose, dislodging it from the rapidly disintegrating wreck, just about shaking the crap out of her on its bone-jarring way into the great wide open.
Christina Engela
You will need to stay calm as you witness the candy floss in your daughter’s smile harden into brittle bitchiness. You will need to muster a new resolve as your son’s fascination with Pokémon shifts to porn. You will have to recalibrate your mothering instinct to accommodate the notion that not only do your children poop and burp, they also masturbate, drink and smoke. As their bodies, brains and worlds rearrange themselves, you will need to do your own reshuffling. You will come to see that, though you gave them life, they’re the ones who’ve got a life. They’ve got 1700 friends on Facebook. They’ve got YouTube accounts (with hundreds of sub- scribers), endless social arrangements, concerts, Valentine’s Day dances and Halloween parties. What we have – if we’re lucky – is a ‘Thanks for the ride, Mum, don’t call me, I’ll call you,’ as they slam the car door and indicate we can run along now.
Joanne Fedler
When it comes to generating writing material, teenagers are gold. Their world is a narcissistic, anarchic, paranoid hell of anxieties and stresses about how they look; how popular they are or aren’t; and how fast or slowly, big or small their private parts are growing. As an observer, it’s fantastic. Hilarious, at times. Poignant and heartbreaking. It is all the stuff of great human drama because, before your eyes, you get to witness character transformation. Boy grows into man. Girl grows into woman. Writers strain to make this shit up.But – and here’s the catch – we dare not discuss any of this if we want our kids to trust us or ever talk to us again. And that’s because, lifts and pocket money aside, teenagers crave privacy – the need for which hatches both swiftly and silently while we’re sorting out the laundry. It’s as if they suddenly wake up one day creeped out by the thought of all those years we wiped their butts and helped them put on their undies and they go into lock- down. They smoke us out, put up walls, close their doors, shut down their stories, and waft, earphoned, through our homes in a shroud of hormones and appetite. Their lives – in which, until recently, we participated with Too Much Information and gross oversharing – suddenly become ‘none of our business.
Joanne Fedler
There will come a time when a person you most likely pushed out through your vagina and nursed from yournipples, whose bottom you wiped, and whose snot and spit you cleaned up over several sleep-starved years will apprehend you with a mixture of boredom and irritation and say, ‘Get a life, Mum.’This would be a good time to remember that a) violence never solved anything; b) teenagers don’t have a full brain yet – the prefrontal cortex that controls the ability to make important distinctions, like who controls the pocket money, only kicks in around the age of twenty-four; and c) you are, in fact, the adult.
Joanne Fedler
Prison is designed to break one's spirit and destroy one's resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality--all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.
Nelson Mandela
It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.
Nelson Mandela
An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Interviews were invented to make journalism less passive. Instead of waiting for something to happen, journalists ask someone what should or could happen.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A makeover is the rebranding of a human being.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Don't listen to a man who says we have to work together as a team. He means we have to work as he says.
C.J. Langenhoven
It does not mean much to be important. The most important man at a burial is dead.
C.J. Langenhoven
I don’t know what more to say... I did not follow up in the days to come. I did not, I did, I should, I could... Just like that, I let that entire ordeal go.
Phindiwe Nkosi
Praise is the most efficient tool to win many battles at once. It is through praise that the walls of Jericho collapsed, the same way Paul and Silas praised their way out of jail.
Gugu Mona
What’s the difference?” I asked him. “Between the love of your life, and your soulmate?”“One is a choice, and one is not.
Tarryn Fisher