Quotes from A Bend in the River

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“Going home at night! It wasn't often that I was on the river at night. I never liked it. I never felt in control. In the darkness of river and forest you could be sure only of what you could see — and even on a moonlight night you couldn't see much. When you made a noise — dipped a paddle in the water — you heard yourself as though you were another person. The river and the forest were like presences, and much more powerful than you. You felt unprotected, an intruder ... You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“Small things start us in new ways of thinking”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“It was as Nazruddin had said, when I asked him about visas and he had said that bank notes were better. '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.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he's got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“As for the young man carrying the groceries, he was a thin, fair-skinned young man, and I would have said that he had been born in the house. He had the vacant, dog-like expressions that house-born slaves, as I remembered, liked to put on when they were in public with their masters and performing some simple task. This fellow was pretending that the Waitrose groceries were a great burden, but this was just an act, to draw attention to himself and the lady he served. He, too, had mistaken me for an Arab, and when we crossed he had dropped the burdened-down expression and given me a look of wistful inquisitiveness, like a puppy that wanted to play but had just been made to understand that it wasn't playtime.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“... and it was extraordinary to me that some of the newspapers could have found good words for the butchery on the coast. But people are like that bout places in which they aren't really interested and where thy don't have to live.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“They say that men should look at the mother of the girl they intend to marry," Yvette said. "Girls who did what I did should consider the wife a man has discarded or worn out, and know thye are not going to do much better.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“That was the best time. The last day, the day of leaving. It was a good journey. It became different at the other end.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“He spoke about Africa in an unusual way. He spoke of Africa as though Africa was a sick child and he was the parent.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“I shared in the boom. I was energetic in my own modest way. But I was also restless. You so quickly get used to peace. It is like being well – you take it for granted, and forget that when you were ill to be well again had seemed everything. And with peace and the boom I began to see the town as ordinary, for the first time.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“But the airplane is a wonderful thing. You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The airplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You don't grieve too much. And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn't exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here." He touched his heart. "It isn't there." And he pointed at the dusty road.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“I knew there was something that separated me from Ferdinand and the life of the bush about me. And it was because I had no means in my day-to-day life of asserting this difference, of exhibiting my true self, that I fell into the stupidity of exhibiting my things.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“It made smuggling easy; but I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“Always, sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rain and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilaccoloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it “the new thing” or “the new thing in the river,” and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled. I”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“With our cynicism, created by years of insecurity, how did we look on men? We judged the salesmen in the van der Weyden by the companies they represented, their ability to offer us concessions. Knowing such men, having access to the services they offered, and being flattered by them that we were not ordinary customers paying the full price or having to take our place in the queue, we thought we had mastered the world.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“If you look at a column of ants on the march you will see that there are some who are stragglers or have lost their way. The column has no time for them; it goes on. Sometimes the stragglers die. But even this has no effect on the column. There is a little disturbance around the corpse, which is eventually carried off—and then it appears so light. And all the time the great busyness continues, and that apparent sociability, that rite of meeting and greeting which ants travelling in opposite directions, to and from their nest, perform without fail. So”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had – the dullness, the pointless tension, ‘the situation of the country’. It wasn’t a wish to be involved with people as trapped as myself.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“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. But I felt now as if I was experiencing anew, and seeing a woman for the first time.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“On the white wall at the end of the room was a large oil painting of a European port, done in reds and yellows and blues. It was in slapdash modern style; the lady had painted it herself and signed it. She had given it pride of place in her main room. Yet she hadn’t thought it worth the trouble of taking away.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past. I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber. He couldn’t tell me when he had done this. It was just there in his memory, floating around, without date or other association, as an unusual event in an uneventful life.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

“If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were moral. We didn’t lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn’t think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did.”
― V.S. Naipaul, quote from A Bend in the River

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