Peter Abrahams Quotes

It seemed to me there was no sense in life. Things happened and no one seemed to know why.

You are Colored. There are three kinds of people: white people, Colored people, and black people. The white people come first, then the Colored people, then the black people. Lee asks “Why?” but Aunt’s answer is, “Because it is so.

You write in English and already you are touching things that should not be mentioned.

If a man loves a woman he loves her. That is all. There is no bad and there is no good. There is only love. The only thing that is bad is if a man loves a woman and she loves him not.

I am no good and I cannot help myself. It will be right if you hate me. You should beat me. But inside me there is something wrong. And it is because I want the things of the white people. I want to be like the white people and go where they go and do the things they do and I am black. I cannot help it. Inside I am not black and I do not want to be a black person.

He did not want to go there for fear he should meet Eliza. And she was like a devil in his blood. He could not forget her.

It's because I creep up on people, I creep up on them while their backs are turned. Then suddenly without knowing how they realise, I'm there and they want what's there. Only they can't have it.

Really these streets and trees, almost the clean air I breathed here were: RESERVED FOR EUROPEANS ONLY. I was the intruder. And like the intruder, I walked carefully lest I be discovered. I longed for what the white folk had. I envied them their superior European lot

The concerts and theatres, the libraries and the parks, the bookshops and the clean, fresh looking tearooms, the buses and departmental stores.

Hoopvlei was another of the white man's ventures to get the natives and coloreds out of the towns. The natives did not like the locations, and besides, they were all full, so the white man had started townships in the outlying district of Johannesburg in the hope of killing Vrededorp and Malay Camp. Many other places had been killed thus.

Leah left him and he collapsed in a heap. She looked down and spat. The she raised her heel and brought it down on his face.

It was difficult for the Africans most of whom had taken European education and embraced Christian religion, to revert to the rapidly dying, outdated traditions and customs of their forefathers

I remember the many people who suddenly invaded the house, making me feel stranger in my own home...With his (father’s) going, the order and stability that had been in my life dissolved. There was no breadwinner. So we had to leave the place that had been our home.

He (Roderiques) was hungry and homeless. So I fed him. He told me something had gone wrong and he had to leave the Roman school. He said he had no people.

I am no good and I cannot help myself. It will be right if you hate me. You should beat me. But inside me there is something wrong. And it is because I want the things of the white people. I want to be like the white people and go where they go and do the things they do and I am black. I cannot help it.