Bessie Emery Head Quotes

The prisoner swung round, blinking rapidly, yet at the same time sizing up the enemy. He was a new warder, named Jacobus Stephanus Hannetjie. His eyes were the color of the sky but they were frightening. A simple, primitive, brutal soul gazed out of them.

The year ended in a roar of pain.

There's only one way to make yourself shock-proof. Do not be impressed by evil and do not be impressed by good.

One might go so far as to say that it is strong, dominating personalities who might play a decisive role when things are changing. Somehow they always manage to speak with the voice of authority, and their innate strength of character drives them to take the lead in almost any situation. Allied to all this is their boundless optimism and faith in their fellow men.

It was in Botswana where, mentally, the normal and the abnormal blended completely in Elizabeth’s mind.”

Above all the necessities of life, human beings need love and it is often the one thing most denied to them.

But witch doctors were human, and nothing, however odd and perverse, need be feared if it was human.

Prostitutes, he was to decide, were the best type of women you'd find among all black women, unless a man wanted to be trapped for life by a dead thing. A prostitute laughed. She established her own kind of equality with men. She picked up a wide, vicarious experience that made her charter in a lively way, and she was so used to the sex organs of men that she was inclined to regard him as a bit more than a sex organ. Not so the dead thing most men married. Someone told that dead thing that a man was only his sex organs and functioned as such. Someone told her that she was inferior in every way to a man, and she had been inferior for so long that even if a door opened somewhere, she could not wear this freedom gracefully. There was no balance between herself and a man. There was nothing but this quiet, contemptuous, know-all silence between herself, the man and his functioning organs. And everyone called this married life, even the filthy unwashed children, the filthy unwashed floors, and piles of unwashed dishes.

Who is the greater man - the man who cries, broken by anguish, or his scoffing, mocking, jeering oppressor?

Sometimes a man's God was like Solomon and he decked himself up in gold and he built a house that was a hundred cubits in length and fifty cubits in breadth and thirty cubits in height. Gold candlesticks, cherubims, and pomegranates adorned his house, which had forty bathrooms. And there are bowls and snuffers and spoons and censers and door hinges of pure gold. And all that the followers of Solomon could do was to gape and marvel and chronicle these wonders in minute detail. Even Solomon's wisdom took secondary place to his material possessions and dazzling raiment. Then came a God who was greater than Solomon, but he walked around with no shoes, in rough cloth, wandering up and down the dusty footpath in the hot sun, with no bed on which to rest his head. And all that the followers of this God could do was to chronicle, in minute detail, the wonder and marvel of his wisdom.

He had grown up in an atmosphere where the most important thing in the world was the stronger whose shadow darkened the doorstep. People were the central part of the universe of Africa, and the world stood still because of this.

There was always something on this earth man was forced to love and worship by reason of its absence. People in cloudy, misty climates worshipped the sun, and people in semi-desert countries worshipped the rain.

People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. ... It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion a like that.

You know, comrades,” he said, “I’ve got Hannetjie. I’ll betray him tomorrow.”

The rhythm of sunrise, the rhythm of sunset, filled her life.