"You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving."
"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."
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Source: Alexandra Fuller (2005). “Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier”, p.175, Penguin
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"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."