André Brink

Quotes

1. Attempt to grasp, with the creative imagination, the past and its silences.

   p. 25

2. 

   Violence our language. A land hostile, empty, strange: it does not talk back, remains inaccessible. Which forces this violence from us,its motive achingly pure. On and one we move through the evermore arid landscape, sowing destruction as we go (....) An orgy of blood (...) with the single purpose of leaving on that virgin barren place the scrawl of our progress. We were here to acquire, to conquer, to have, to possess: I have therefore I am. Land, you are woman. Woman, you are mine.

   p. 235

3. 

   Specific silences imposed by certain historical conjunctions.

   p. 14

4. 

   Even during the days and nights when she was dazed and only half awake the stories must have insinuated themselves into her torn and bruised body like draughts and ointments with healing powers beyond all explanation. (There is no pain and no badness,) she still hears the dry voice of old Taras in her ear, that a story cannot cure.

   p. 94

5. 

   [t]hrough perceiving the world as a story to be told and endlessly reshaped, I would argue, the reader is actually encouraged to act upon the world (..) literature becomes more, not less, potent

   p. 14

6. 

   I believe more and more that as a man I owe it to herat least to try to understand what makes her a person, an individual,what defines her as a woman.

   p. 153

7. 

   Uncovers the dark places into which we may fear to look.

   p. 66

8. 

   How curious, this urge they have, all of them, to leave their mark on a woman's body. As if despair lies behind it, and fear, (..) In each theneed, the terrifying urge, to scar and leave his mark. And only her body available for their inscription.

   p. 148

9. 

   She did what no one had thought possible.

   p. 66

10. 

    ...flotsam from the fatherland.

    p. 12

11. 

    Address two silences simultaneously: that created by the marginalization of women,and that effected by a (white-dominated) master-narrative of history.

    p. 24

12. 

    History provides one of the most fertile silences to be revisited by South African writers because the dominant discourse of white historiography (...) has inevitably silenced, for so long,so many other possibilities.

    p. 22