Claire Robertson Quotes

Admit only your victories until you have hooked their interest, then you draw them closer and admit the sort of failings that reflect well on a fellow, sentimental failings: that was the theory of courtship the young master had formulated...

There is no 'what if'. Only in stories.

He has entertained the thought that his neighbours like having one of him in the district, having their own Englishman, although he will insist that he is as South African as they are. But perhaps his presence is more in the nature of a provocation, and his actions: he pretends ignorance but he knows what those spindly pink and white flowers mean to men who still punish themselves with every detail of their war, picking at it like the scab of the miniature Union Jack in the middle of the flag.

I had come by then to be conscious of this aspect of slave lives: at one and the same time the masters held contrary beliefs about those they bought into their homes, viz., It did not matter what a slave saw and so behaviour that the masters would be ashamed to even have rumoured about them was carried forward unchecked in front of their slaves; and at the same time they protested: how dare you, a slave, look at us as we do thus or thus?

Ours was the age of enlightenment, he said, when the battle cry was, 'We must know, we shall know!', and reason would depose superstition and we be liberated by it.

He leaned into Le Voir's face with the calliper and breathed on him, holding forth on this new science of which calibration was the test; these measurements would describe classes of being and we who had provided the parameters would be fit within them. To hear him tell it, this classification of species was the hope of Man.