Quotes
List here any quote, from George Packer's book, The Village of Waiting.
Quotes that inspire you, or give you a strong visual image, or maybe you just admire
the author's use of words ..... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ...
The pressure of letters in my back pocket. Letters from home. Normally I tore them open as soon as I had my hands on them. But home was farther away than ever tonight. I decided not to read them yet. I could taste how lonely they'd make me; I wanted to give myself a fighting chance to get used to this isolation.
ReplyDeleteAt night the forest filled with spirits. Every tree housed one; they lurked in the elephant grass and the hollow of dead plam trunks. Christine once told me of the God who wandered the woods outside our yard. She wouldn't pronounce his name after dark, but she told me that he would change shape from dwarf to giant, that his face was hideously scarred, that he gave you the pox, that you heard the clop-clop of his feet whenever he crossed the paved road, and that if you went into the woods at night and met him, he would stare you down until you were sick with confusion, lost your memory, could never find your way back home. As she spoke the children listened in terrified silence. Whistling or dragging a rope, or anything that might attract him at night was forbidden. In daylight Christine was willing to tell me this god's name: Sakpate.
ReplyDeleteAnimism is the triumph of night over the mind.
ReplyDeleteNo English copybooks, then ; and the kids responded like snails whose shells have been snatched off by a sadistic boy.
ReplyDeleteI suggested that things never change at home, that it was school that put new ideas in one's head.
ReplyDeleteThe sun was a thin red disk hanging behind the harmattan dust clouds, giving off impossible amounts of heat like a split atom. You couldn't stay in it for more than five minutes.
ReplyDeleteYou are never more white in Africa than when you are traveling.
ReplyDeleteI was about as anonymous on my travels as an eight-foot circus freak let loose in the streets.
ReplyDelete“The man of the city,” he said, “is not as happy as the peasant, you know. He owns so many things,and he has so many worries. For the peasant, authentic life is work, work, work, very hard - but at least he is in peace.”
ReplyDeleteWesterners passed through the chief’s life like white birds flying just overhead, signs of a land his dinghy never quite reached.
ReplyDeleteThe snake never counts the eggs it steals.
ReplyDeleteBabies were born squalling, the old shrank up and died; time wasn't going forward, it rehearsed the same small circle. This was living closer to nature and the life cycle than most environmentalists ever get or would care to. When it didn't rain there were no crops; when night fell there was no light but the moon; when people got very sick they usually died.
ReplyDeleteSuddenly a meteor shot out: it seemed to slip and fall as if a string had been cut. Christine saw too.
ReplyDelete"That means," she said, "that somebody dies. Every man has a star there. When he dies it falls from the sky. Because we see it, it is someone in the village."
Farmers, like columns of ants after a rain, emerged from shade and torpor and began going to the fields every day.
ReplyDeleteOuagadougou was a city built on foreign aid, and it seemed to exist in order to maintain foreign aid.
ReplyDelete...
At the Rec Center the man from the World Bank sipped his beer and licked his moustache that needed trimming. "Ouaga's one of the better jobs, believe it or not. Good pay, and living here costs nothing. 'Course, you get plenty of WAWA anywhere." The acronym, a common usage among old hands in the region, which was was intended to sound plucky but came off a little snide, meant, "West Africa Wins Again."
The door flew open and a white man wearing a doctor's coat and stethoscope breezed in. About forty, he was tall and had a light brown beard and cold blue eyes. All at once the racism that whites in Africa feel deep down without even knowing it came welling up in a flood of relief. That the face peering down without much interest into mine was white meant everything. It meant I wasn't going to die.
ReplyDeleteSelf-caricature played a part in Simon Tamekloe's teaching, and even more in his expansive, literate, ribald wit. He savored the English language like slices of expensive foreign cheese; his sentences flowed out in elegant shapes colored by elaborate metaphors that always seemed a little archaic - "She would howl like a fox on a cold windy morning!" "Power is sweet like honey to taste but it will stick to your fingers and you can never let go of it" - the usage of a man educated in the English system in Ghana, and steeped in American and African literature, who never lived in a country where English was the first language and who read as much of it as he heard.
ReplyDeleteI have lost everything, everything has become a jungle where the strongest win out. All I can hope for now is to find something better in order to abandon this box that is becoming poison to me. So, each day, I think I have to live the philosophy of the cicada, which is to say: “To live happy, live hidden.”
ReplyDelete