Peter Abrahams Quotes

Light is white: dark is black.

Dear God! Has earth a fairer land? Can there be one as fair? And if there can, can I feel for it as for this? And can my heart ever ache for the people of another with the purity it does for the people of this? The whites here sing a love song to the land, from within. Would they have me sing it from without? A little self-conscious and ashamed at the intensity of my emotions. New feelings, elusive and uncontrollable, played on my heart and mind. A need different from all the other needs I had ever known moved me to longing. And I did not know what I longed for.

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Africans most of whom had taken European education and embraced Christian religion, to revert to the rapidly dying, outdated traditions and customs of their forefathers

Dressed in an orange sack. Three holes in the sack allowed for his head and arms to come through. About his waist was a piece of rope that gathered the sack in and made it hang like some monkish garb. He was barefooted.

All the years of his life had been spent walking through the land; from east to west, then back; from north to south, then back.

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

Twenty-second Street, the street where we lived, was strange and alien. The noise was frightening after the quiet of Elsburg.

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.

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.

I pushed my nose and lip...I was inside the raindrop away from the misery of the cold damp room. I was in a place of warmth and sunshine, inside my raindrop world.

If a woman loves a man she does that which is good for him.

A woman finds a man and the whole world is a new place. And the fighting stiffness that was ever in her body, goes. And the hardness of her head stops and she does not think any more with her head but feels with her heart. Yes, it is ever so. And with a man it is so too. His shoulders square and a smile is not far from his lips and there is a new certainty in him. Yes. It has ever been so and it will ever be so when a man and a woman love. **Page 123

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.

The natives did not like 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.

It is not enough to destroy, you must build as well. Build up a stock of faith in your breast in native Zuma, mine boy, who has no social conscience, who cannot read or write and cannot understand his wanting what you want. **Page 69.