Breyten Breytenbach Quotes

In dancing with the enemy one follows his steps even if counting under one's breath.

Dangerous because your present Administration and its specialized agencies by all accounts know no restraint in hitting out at any perceived enemy of America, and nobody or nothing can protect one from their vindictiveness.

To be an African is not a choice, it is a condition ... To be an African is not through lack of being integrated in Europe ... neither is it from regret of the crimes perpetrated by "my people" ... No, it is simply the only opening I have for making use of all my sense and capabilities ... The African earth was the first to speak. I have been pronounced once and for all.

I came, I saw, I was confused.

The recognition and the acceptance of the Other's humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to -know- that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows.

The goal, I submit, is obvious: subjugating the world (which is barbarian, dangerous, envious and ungrateful) to US power for the sake of America's interests.

It would be a tragic mistake for us out here to imagine that Bush represents the hearts and the minds of the majority of your countrymen. Many of your black and other compatriots must be just as anguished as we are.

Rhythm, repetition, making patterns
these are not only important devices for shaping the strange and abstract instrument/object we call a poem or a story, but they are craved as well because of our primordial need for reassurance, the sense of security we get from moving over the known. A mystery doesn't lose power in revisiting. Writing is not just to know, it is also to console. We need to be reminded that we are part of the obscure rhythm of birth and decade. It is the humming that matters.

In reality the workings of your governing system are opaque and covert, while hiding in the chattering spotlight of an ostensible transparency, even though the ultimate objective is clear.

The predominant yardstick of your government is not human rights but national interests.

You ride astride the imaginary in order to hunt down the real.

And gradually we will rot like old ships or trees
But keep Pain far from Me o Lord

Leaving traces of ourselves, as in creative productivity, could then be seen as part of the definition of consciousness for us as well. We know that in order to progress we must stretch for something just out of reach
if only for a life that will be more compassionate and decent than the cruelty, paranoia, greed, narrow corporatism, or narcissism we mostly indulge in and find such ample justification for. And so we dream.

Even ivory towers need central heating.

History is a succession of things that ought never to have happened, and the writing act is a kind of revenge against this.

It may be an extreme example brought about by abnormal circumstances - but the criteria of human rights kick in, surely, precisely when the conditions are extreme and the situation is abnormal.