Alexandra Fuller Quotes

• You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Grief, Grieving, Littles

  46 Copy quote

• But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself -- maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Rocks, Rivers, Rainbow

  Alexandra Fuller (2014). “Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: Picador Classic”, p.38, Pan Macmillan

  19 Copy quote

• How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Country, Driving, Depends

  11 Copy quote

• One of the things about being raised British in Africa is that you get this double whammy of toughness. The continent in place itself made you quite tough. And then you've got this British mother whose entire being rejects 'coddling' in case it makes you too soft. So there's absolutely nothing standing between you and a fairly rough experience.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Mother, Tough, Self Made

  11 Copy quote

• What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Writing, Skeletons, Dust

  8 Copy quote

• This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Circles, Choices, Full Circle

  Alexandra Fuller (2002). “Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood”, p.287, Random House

  10 Copy quote

• I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Mother, I Love My Mother, Whole

  "People think the book is a love-letter to Africa, but really it is a love-letter to my mother". Interview with Louisa Young, www.theguardian.com. March 14, 2002.

  8 Copy quote

• I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible--from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin--to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't know if it's even useful to try.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Journey, Thinking, Vocabulary

  4 Copy quote

• The rains are rhythmic, coming religiously in the afternoons (after lunch has been eaten but before tea, so that the nights are washed clean-black with bright pinpoints of silver starlight hanging over a restless, grateful earth).

  Alexandra Fuller

  Grateful, Rain, Night

  Alexandra Fuller (2014). “Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: Picador Classic”, p.202, Pan Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Real, Book, Writing

  5 Copy quote

• You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

  Alexandra Fuller

  War, Jumping, Hatred

  8 Copy quote

• There aren't enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don't do it for the money or because they want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breathe or eat or love.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Doctors, People, Needs

  Alexandra Fuller (2014). “Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: Picador Classic”, p.140, Pan Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Self Love, Looks, Tough

  "People think the book is a love-letter to Africa, but really it is a love-letter to my mother". Interview with Louisa Young, www.theguardian.com. March 14, 2002.

  5 Copy quote

• The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absorb white man's blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattle and the blood from a woman's birthing with equal thirst. It doesn't care.

  Alexandra Fuller

  War, Fighting, Men

  Alexandra Fuller (2014). “Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: Picador Classic”, p.31, Pan Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

• Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Animal, Eight, Two

  Alexandra Fuller (2002). “Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood”, p.191, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• People who disagree with His Excellency, the President for Life and 'Chief of Chiefs,' are frequently found to be the victims of car crashes (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets); or dead in their beds of heart attacks (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets); or the recipients of some not-quite-fresh seafood (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets).

  Alexandra Fuller

  Heart, Car, People

  Alexandra Fuller (2002). “Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood”, p.215, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Book, Becoming, Wonderful

  11 Copy quote

• FBI Girl is a gorgeous, sumptuous book. Conlon-McIvor takes a subject (herself and her family) that might have sunk in other hands, beats egg white under her words and the whole thing rises like a dream. It's a love story for her people and for a time and place. Read it.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Girl, Dream, Book

  4 Copy quote

• Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a fresh way of viewing the both literature and the world. From then on, I found I was impatient with books that were not honest or that were trivial and frivolous.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Book, Reality, Diaries

  8 Copy quote

• It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Real, Taken, Men

  Alexandra Fuller (2005). “Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier”, p.175, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• Surely until all of us own and honor one another's dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Honor, Done, Dignity

  Alexandra Fuller (2011). “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness”, p.146, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• I had the constitution of a missionary.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Health, Missionary, Constitution

  Alexandra Fuller (2014). “Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: Picador Classic”, p.42, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• In ways I don't entirely have the words for an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Real, Lessons, Way

  "'Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness' by Alexandra Fuller". Interview with Jeff Glor, www.cbsnews.com. September 19, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• In general, I almost always watch foreign films.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Watches, Film

  4 Copy quote

• I listen mostly to classical music.

  Alexandra Fuller

  Classical Music

  4 Copy quote

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