The Promise Quotes
"The moment the metal box speaks her name, Amor knows it’s happened."
"She closes her eyes and shakes her head. No, no. It can’t be true."
"It hasn’t happened, not actually. And especially not to Ma, who will always, always be alive."
"All she wants to do is lie down on her bed and fall asleep and never, never wake up."
"The only thing that is true is the hands, and me looking at the hands."
"I’m sorry, Miss Starkey says again, covering her big teeth behind thin, pressed-together lips."
"What are we, that we have to eat other bodies to keep going?"
"The truth is that your mother gave up Dutch Reformed and went back to the Jewish thing just to spite my little brother."
"She tries not to listen, by focusing on something else."
"The terrible news, delivered in public, in front of the headmistress!"
"A brown-and-yellow countryside passes outside, dry except for where a river cuts through it, under a huge Highveld sky."
"The ways of the Lord are forever mysterious to us!"
"You get the idea. She touches down where her spirit was once thick, but she’s no longer solid, a watercolour woman."
"All human life is like grass upon the earth."
"No, I’m not all right. My mother is dead."
"He is calling for his assistant, whom he otherwise detests, but Siebritz will not reply."
"She’s used to being treated as a blur, a smudge at the edge of everybody’s vision."
"His hand is against everyone and everyone’s hand against him!"
"God decreed it so, just as He decreed that Rachel should die at the hour she died and that her house should be filled with those who mourn her."
"The world is imperfect, yes, but at moments like these it can be whole."
"But there is no reckoning. For each of us, death is the last day."
"The passion, no, the poison in his blood has driven him down there."
"Return feels like a condition more than an act, one for which she’s in no way prepared."
"What am I doing here? she thinks, though perhaps not in words."
"To come to terms with something you’re afraid of, you have to imagine it enough."
"The Lord is never unfair! Come now, Andrew, pray with me."
"I was crazy when Ma died. For a while I actually believed I killed her."
"In this case, brother and sister are merely names that sit on top of a much deeper entanglement."
"Where are we? cries Alwyn Simmers. Almost there, Laetitia Simmers replies."
"Who’s there? he calls suddenly, sensing a presence close to his knees."
"Let us go home, Laetitia. I have seen enough."
"Really, this interlude has served no purpose, we could have done without it, yet it’s repeated in reverse just four days later."
"Fred Winkler feels his soul dangling deep inside himself sometimes, like a stalactite."
"Some deaths are natural, Alwyn Simmers tells them. But when somebody dies by accident, it can feel like an injustice has occurred."
"The blind minister has found his rhetorical flow, his beautiful voice curling away between termite hills and tussocks of grass."
"His rage like a hot gale blowing through him. Make no mistake, I am home."
"We rise out of nature into culture, but you have to fight to keep your lofty perch, otherwise nature pulls you back down."
"But where is Amor? It is definitely Astrid who says this."
"She can hear her name being called amid the yelling and whistling going on downstairs, and there’s a similar uproar from the labourers’ cottages a short distance away, but all the cacophony of celebration is far from her, like a speech in a strange language."
"No surprise on either count, not in his eyes. Even kind of affecting, seen from a distance."
"But boredom and petulance have corrupted her features, inking in a little frown between her eyes, a sulky pout to her bottom lip."
"He’s had Pa’s old shotgun serviced since then, just in case. Thinking of getting an electric fence put in, around the house."
"And in the morning, of course, when the whole country wakes up with a hangover, like a compound fracture in the brain, it’s no different with the Swarts, who are filled with greed and grief, as well as alcohol."
"Behind them, a step back, is a handful of workers from the farm, who, in keeping with the new expansive spirit abroad in the country, have been allowed into the enclosure of the family cemetery itself."
"At last he says, The church. The church? Yes. If you could take me past the church. I’d like to speak to the priest."
"I am a widower. He keeps thinking it, over and over, that phrase, I am a widower, trying out the strangeness of the word, of the condition it denotes."
"The priest’s mind is like a bald tyre, spinning for purchase in sand."
"God forgive me, But sometimes the truth is best."
"You have to know the truth before you can submit to it."
"Odd that people hardly ever talk about their motions, considering it’s an everyday event."
"The brain would like to deny it, despite the fundamental truths being uttered down below."
"Forgive that misguided woman, Father, she longed for penance."
"I spoke out of love! And to her husband as well."
"Time is a river that washes the world away."
"Time passes differently for those who’re shut out of the world."
"Leaving the guilt aside, aren’t duty and obligation what you take on in a marriage?"
"Truth is, for him marriage has been like two people coming together to make a third."
"No character in a novel ever does what he’s doing now."
"He tries to see what she’s written, but she’s tilting the notebook away."
"Duty and obligation work in both directions."
"The real world has become too huge, too heavy, to be carried around in a basket."
"I feel guilt because I want to leave her."
"It’s a terrible event to come to terms with."
"Whatever Salome thinks, our mother wanted her to have the Lombard place."
"There are a couple of minor ectoplasmic entities lying on the floor, fortunately harmless."
"It’s not a cause for sadness when God has called a Beloved to Him."
"We live in exile, in the land of Noddy."
"This smeary sensation, the edges rubbed away, is it my eyesight or my brain?"
"What’s unexpected is how sad he feels about it."
"The ashes will be ready for collection in a couple of weeks."
"I must go back. That’s what she’s thinking, I must go back. She’s the only one left and she must go back."
"Just to think of it makes her want to fall down. All the force and fury of him, turned in and poured white-hot down that metal tube, aimed at the very centre of his life."
"Although, not quite. For it takes two or three hours to burn a body down, and the furnaces are few and the dead are many."
"Big changes are coming for her, obviously. She doesn’t know what they are, but they’re coming."
"I want to do it, she says. Can we leave it at that?"
"The rain has no prejudice. It falls without judgement on both the living and the dead."
"In the end, though it’s hard to believe, it’s Jacob Zuma who brings them together."
"She’s aware Amor might take a different view. Maybe he should move out again temporarily, just while she’s here?"
"You’re building your defences, he murmurs equably, before she’s even got here. Try to stay open to what the universe brings."
"And when the storm finally passes, in the small hours, it leaves a dripping calmness behind it."