A Bend In The River Quotes
"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."
"You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out. That is a private fight. Everybody has to find his own way."
"Each day's drive was like an achievement; each day's achievement made it harder for me to turn back."
"The further away they got from the centre and their tribal area, the less likely they were to cut loose from the caravans and run back home."
"What had been the European suburb near the rapids had been burnt down, and bush had grown over the ruins; it was hard to distinguish what had been gardens from what had been streets."
"Traders on the coast used to say—especially when they were consoling themselves for some bad purchase—that everything eventually had its buyer."
"The day that happens, Mis' Salim, I will know the time has come to stay home."
"I used to think of this feeling of insecurity as a weakness, a failing of my own temperament."
"We were stuck with them. That was how it was on the east coast."
"But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization."
"The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves."
"But they were buried so deep in their lives that they were not able to stand back and consider the nature of their lives."
"I had to break away from our family compound and our community."
"Nazruddin's shop was in a market square in the commercial area. It smelt of rats and was fall of dung, but it was intact."
"Ferdinand had begun to grow up, and he was finding himself a little bit at sea."
"He wanted to find out, and he needed me to practice on."
"I could see him now trying on various characters, attempting different kinds of manners."
"Salim, what do you think of the future of Africa?"
"Ferdinand could only tell me that the world outside Africa was going down and Africa was rising."
"The conversations that Ferdinand attempted with me had a serial quality, because he wasn't always well briefed."
"It unsettled me--there wasn't going to be security for anyone in the country."
"When you get away from the chiefs and the politicians there is a simple democracy about Africa: everyone is a villager."
"The friendship between the two men was like the friendship between equals."
"In this part of the country he was a stranger."
"He was always on the lookout for the big break, but he could spend weeks on things that were quite petty."
"The modernity and precision--and, above all, the 'manufactured' look of the plates--really excited him."
"And it was typical of Mahesh's casual approach to business that when it came to getting engraving orders, he could only think of crossing the road back to the van der Weyden."
"It wasn't the ice cream that attracted Mahesh. It was the idea of that simple machine."
"They are dazzled by the machines they import. That is part of their intelligence."
"There's no right and wrong here. There's no right."
"I used to think, from hearing and reading about oil reservoirs, that oil ran in trapped underground streams."
"You so quickly get used to peace. It is like being well--you take it for granted."
"We felt that there was treasure around us, waiting to be picked up."
"Metty, too, was like a man with preoccupations. Freedom had its price."
"Religion turns that melancholy into uplifting fear and hope."
"I had to admire him for it. Though the casualness could lead him into situations that were quite ridiculous."
"And I, so recently his senior, felt jealous and deserted."
"He had shed the past. His hand on my shoulder--what good was that now?"
"Considering myself from that distance, I saw how small and vulnerable we were."
"I felt myself above it all, considering it from this new angle of the powerful."
"Listening to that voice, I felt the deepest part of myself awakening."
"We take it for granted. He's disciplined the army and brought peace to this land of many peoples."
"You couldn't listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time."
"We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe."
"Home--what for? To hide? To bow to our great men?"
"I felt I had been granted the most cruel knowledge of where I stood in the world."
"I felt that in that building complete manhood was permitted only to those men and denied to everybody else."
"The steamer was now meant for the people who used it, and to them it was very grand."
"That was what I had been accustoming myself to since the previous day, when I thought I had said goodbye to Indar."
"You live your life. A stranger appears. He is an encumbrance."
"Women make up half the world; and I thought I had reached the stage where there was nothing in a woman's nakedness to surprise me."
"My obsession with Yvette had taken me by surprise; and the adventure with her (unbought but willing) that began in the white sitting room was for me quite new."
"It was only when she had begun to undress that I understood the nature of my challenge."
"The President made no statement, and nothing was reported on the radio or in the newspapers from the capital."
"Our soldiers and guardians have been given false desires and false greeds and the foreigners now qualify us everywhere as thieves."
"The cult of the woman of Africa kills all our mothers, and since war is an extension of politics we have decided to face the ENEMY with armed confrontation."
"The town, when I drove back, had settled down to its own night life."
"It was against this white wall that, after some talk about the paintings and the Hellenic Club, both of us standing, she showed me her profile, turning away when I drew close."
"But it wasn't for me to condemn him or the others. I was like them. I, too, wanted to stay with what I had; I, too, hated the idea that I might have been caught."
"Strange, reading those diaries. In those days you used to scratch yourself to see whether you bled."
"The knowledge that I was still needed would be like satisfaction enough."
"An idea like that is like a vivid dream, fixing a fear we don't want to acknowledge."
"I couldn't present myself to her as a man tormented and weakened by other men."
"You make me look so good. What will I do without you?"
"I read to remind myself in an easy and enjoyable way of all the things I didn't know."
"Men lived to acquire experience; the quality of the experience was immaterial."
"I had discovered it first about myself, when I was under pressure from the officials."
"I began to understand what he meant. I was in Africa one day; I was in Europe the next morning."
"There was an informal system of magazine exchange in the town; Thé always had something new to look at."
"He liked being in the dark storeroom with nothing in particular to do, just looking at his magazines when the mood took him, and drinking his beer."
"A visit could take up a whole afternoon, with Théime and the woman chatting in the way people chat when they are sheltering from the rain--with long pauses and long hypnotized stares in different directions."
"It was an easy enough life for Théime, easier than anything he could have imagined when he was a mechanic in the health department."
"He wanted both my respect and my tolerance, even my compassion."
"He was like a man enraged by his own helplessness."
"He made constant scenes. He was drunken, aggrieved and threatening, and as deliberately irrational as an official who had decided to be malin."
"It wasn't easy to be calm. The shop became a hateful place to me."
"If Thé doesn't stop it, I'll kill him. I'd rather hoe in the fields than be his servant."
"I thought: Oh, Ali! What have you done to me?"
"This is certainly going to cost you a couple of thousand."
"But one day they will rough you up and then they will discover that you are like everybody else, and then very bad things will happen to you."
"They say it is better to kill for days than to die forever."
"The searchlight, while it was on, had shown thousands, white in the white light."