Quotes by South African Authors - Page 22

Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically.
James David Lewis-Williams
The cerebral cortex, the outer ‘skin’ of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that consciousness arises.
James David Lewis-Williams
Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world – of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future…
James David Lewis-Williams
Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…
James David Lewis-Williams
I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe.
James David Lewis-Williams
Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.
James David Lewis-Williams
Some researchers believe that dreaming is what happens when sensory input to the brain is greatly diminished: the brain then ‘freewheels’, synapses firing more or less at random, and the brain tries to make sense of the resultant stream of images.
James David Lewis-Williams
Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.
James David Lewis-Williams
In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic. This feature has generally – and rather vaguely – been taken to refer to ‘masculinity’, but the painted contexts of the figures seems to confirm that, as in North America, sexual arousal was a metaphor for altered states of consciousness.
James David Lewis-Williams
To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.
J.M. Coetzee
Evil's when you push your agenda over someone else's. When you assert your beliefs over somebody's contrary beliefs. That's evil.
David Kitson
A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.
J.M. Coetzee
There is a string that connects us that is not visible to the eye. Maybe every person has more than one soul they are connected to, and all over the world there are these invisible strings. Maybe the chances that you'll find each and every one of your soulmates is slim. But sometimes you're lucky enough to stumble across one. And you feel a tug. And it's not so much a choice to love them through their flaws and through your differences, but rather you love them without even trying. You love their flaws.
Tarryn Fisher
The small launch bay was littered with debris. A powerful breeze tore at his black silk shirt as Kilroy made his way across it to the waiting shuttle, evoking a feeling like the fingers of fate were caressing his body. “The Hammer” stepped over the body of one of his fallen crew without a trace of care or concern. The air was rushing past him, like a wind, out into space through the wounds in the side of his ship. Fatigued and desperate, the Hammer was running out of options. His ship was a mess, holed in a dozen places, the life support systems failing. Weakened hull sections were collapsing in pressure bursts. The vibrations that shook the deck beneath him now were not from the engines that once drove her forward, but now from the explosions down below, tearing her apart.
Christina Engela
A tractor beam from the Imperial ship locked onto the shuttle and in seconds it became apparent they were being hauled in. The tractor was inescapable, and they knew it. The shuttle’s small yet potent engines struggled vainly against the irresistible pull. Inside, the Hammer and his men prepared to meet their fate.
Christina Engela
He pondered long over this, for might not another man, returning to another valley, have found none of these things? Why was it given to one man to have his pain transmuted into gladness? Why was it given to one man to have such an awareness of God?
Alan Paton
Grace and chocolate cake can cover a world of awkwardness.
Lisa-Jo Baker
You can never escape God's Grace because as you run from it, you run to it.
Gift Gugu Mona
Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' ... he... felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness... like a gush of warm water... All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a tender of the soil.
J.M. Coetzee
When rich, being poor seems *adventurous.*
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A writer's pen depreciates with every word that it writes. Whereas she appreciates with every word that she writes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There are more writers who read than readers who write.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To put an arrogant 'famous' writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A writer’s primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore’s is to make cents.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Every artist takes their final work to the grave.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you are an artist, may no love of wealth or fame or admiration and no fear of blame or misunderstanding make you ever paint, with pen or brush, an ideal of external life otherwise than as you see it.
Olive Schreiner
Peanut butter is a poor man’s marmalade.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Shyness is a luxury reserved for those who are above the poverty line. To a beggar, being shy is deadly.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There’s a very fine line between being broke and being humble.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Juice is a poor man’s dessert.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent
Nelson Mandela
Even though he'd been born into a country unshackling itself from its colonial masters, even though he'd lived through nearly twenty years of freedom, nothing much changed for you when you were poor.
Judy Croome
Using money in one’s attempt to put an end to poverty is like using a border in one’s attempt to put an end to xenophobia.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Rich people read their bills. Poor people dread theirs.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Distinctive facial features of a parent are poor people’s paternity test.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is little to be said in favour of poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship. Many people will appear to befriend you when you are wealthy, but precious few will do the same when you are poor
Nelson Mandela
Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it’s as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away.
Nadine Gordimer
Narcissism is as profitable to a model as scruffiness is to a homeless person.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Leftovers are less tasty if they were left over by someone else, unless you are poor.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Many a rich man’s bed is bigger than many a poor woman’s bedroom; his bedroom, her house.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Leaders should never alienate themselves from the poor, if their main aim is to alleviate poverty.
Gift Gugu Mona
Poverty cannot be defeated unless you first defeat it in the mind.
Nicky Verd
The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all.
Trevor Noah
The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it.
Trevor Noah
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
Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it's only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.
Lauren Beukes
But Sara has spent enough time in the darkness to know that you often have to remain there for a long time before you’re ready for the light again.
Harry Kalmer
Imagine, if you will:A bright yellow star lit the darkness somewhere in deep space, accompanied by its rather dysfunctional family of nine deceptively ordinary-looking planets. During its enormously long lifetime many beings had named it from the far ends of distant telescopes, including it into numerous star clusters and constellations as they were perceived from their vantage points. Once, or maybe twice, creatures simply looked up into their own skies to name it from their own now long dead and deserted worlds. In more recent times, beings from a world that orbited a different sun far away gave it a name too – creatures that called themselves Human, who travelled here and settled on one of its inner planets. The planet they chose to make a new home on? They called that Deanna. They called the star Ramalama.
Christina Engela
Leah" Olivia says quietly, "if you point at me again I'm going to break that manicured finger right off your hand. Now turn around and smile, your daughter is waking up.
Tarryn Fisher
You cannot know what light isif you have not experienced darkness.How could you know what happiness feels likeif you know not what it means to be sad?Right does not exist without wrongHate exists because there is love.You are either driven by fear or love.To love is not to fear.It is to be godly.
Carlyle Labuschagne
I'm afraid." Olivia to Caleb"Afraid of what?" Caleb."Of how vulnerable you make me." Olivia."I make you vulnerable because you love me. That's the price you pay for love, baby girl." Caleb.
Tarryn Fisher
We’re seastnan, we live to protect, sometimes we die and I can’t think of a better way to go than fighting for someone I love.
Caroline Greyling
© Carlyle Labuschagne 2014" As I watched her run down the path and melt with the shadows, I wasn't sure how to feel about her, or the fact that I may just have aided in her escape and doomed us all. I wanted to believe that anyone given a second chance would use it wisely. But wisdom I guess is hard to obtain when destiny stands in its way.
Carlyle Labuschagne
The Lord chose to give me back my life, not because I deserved it, but because he had work for me to do.
Shirley Corder
There is a fine line between paranoia and sensibly caring for our already overburdened bodies.
Shirley Corder
What issues sidetrack you from your mission to get well?
Shirley Corder
This book attempts to record a journey to restoration that applies to ordinary people like you and I. It is a shot towards healing. A step headed for a new consciousness. It emerges from a moment in time where all seems lost.
Phindiwe Nkosi