Athol Fugard

Hally: It’s a bloody awful world when you come to think of it. People can be real bastards.

Sam: That’s the way it is, Hally.

Hally: It doesn’t have to be that way. There is something called progress you know. We don’t exactly burn people at the stake anymore.

Don’t talk crap, Hally! You don’t even know what the word ‘sympathy’ means.

Hally: Not many intellectuals are prepared to shovel manure with the peasants then go home and write a ‘little book’ called War and Peace. Incidentally, Sam, he was somebody else who, to quote, ‘…did not distinguish himself scholastically.

I thought I was keeping it straight and I’ve suddenly wondered whether it is straight, and whether it matters whether it is or not.

Do you think Fathers do any more for their sons, except in terms of money, that Mothers do for their daughters.

Hally: Anyway, that’s my man of magnitude. Charles Darwin! Who’s yours?

Sam: [without hesitation] Abraham Lincoln.

Hally: I might have guessed as much. Don’t get sentimental, Sam. You’ve never been a slave, you know. And anyway, we freed your ancestors here in South Africa long before the Americans.

Somebody once said that there are only two places you can be alone—inside your mother’s womb and inside your coffin.

She’s no match for him when it comes to a battle of words.

You were scared of the ball because it was big and hard and could hurt you, just like life can hurt you.

Doesn’t it sort of bug you that people like your dad can’t take care of the world?

Little white boy ... and a black man old enough to be his father flying a kite.

Fly another kite, I suppose. It worked once, and this time I need it as much as you do."