“...a butterfly is like the soul of a person, it dries out in captivity.”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“Everything is important. To the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree, the deepest stone in the drift.”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“First smile!! An unseasonal little shower of rain fell here, and a lot of butterflies drowned, so we put them in the sun and they came back to life, and flew up and then Agaat SMILED!”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“Does a mirror preserve everything that has been reflected in it? Is there a record of light, thin membranes compressed layer upon layer that one has to ease apart with the finger-tips so that the colors don't dissipate, so that the moments don't blot and the hours don't run together into inconsequential splotches? So that a song of preserved years lies in your palm, a miniature of your life and times, with every detail meticulous in clear, chanting angel-fine enamel, as on the old manuscripts, at which you can peer through a magnifying glass and marvel at so much effort? So many tears for nothing? For light? For bygone moments?”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“In a state of pseudo-death you restore your substance.”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“..did i think i was god that i had to lie and take it did i think then i was a mountain or a hill or a ridge and who told me that and who decided stones had no rights for stones can waste away from being denied from being abused and who decided who is the ploughed and who ploughs and why did i not get up and why not go away and what would have happened if i had resisted..”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“Well, I am something, Ma, you hissed, I am not nothing, I am somebody and I know what I want from life and I know what to do to get it. I will provide for myself.”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“And I will close my eyes and prepare myself so that they can unscrew my head and allow the map to slip into my lacunae. So that I can be filled and braced from the inside and fortified for the voyage. Because without my world inside me I will contract and congeal, more even than I am now, without speech and without actions and without any purchase upon time.”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“After all the years, after everything that you'd had to endure, after everything that you'd undertaken, however good or bad, long after you'd given up all hope, the reward.”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“Nobody can be so beautiful from the outside and so hollow from inside. Not even in a third-rate novel.”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“Marriage is holy and it's private.”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
“..we all have to do things in this life that we don't like..”
― Marlene van Niekerk, quote from Agaat
Marlene van Niekerk
Born place: in Caledon, South Africa
Born date November 10, 1954
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“Libra mi cuello de la espada. Y mi vida de las garras del perro.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Power of the Dog
“Sometimes, you have to look back in order to understand the things that lie ahead.”
― Yvonne Woon, quote from Dead Beautiful
“Most things look better from a distance...And as a matter of fact, so do most people. - The Spook, pg 435”
― Joseph Delaney, quote from Curse of the Bane
“You are all too rich to be happy, child. For must not each of you be the constitutions of your family marry to be still richer? People who know in what their main excellence consists are not to be blamed (are they?) for cultivating and improving what they think most valuable? Is true happiness any part of your family-view?—So far from it, that none of your family but yourself could be happy were they not rich. So let them fret on, grumble and grudge, and accumulate; and wondering what ails them that they have not happiness when they have riches, think the cause is want of more; and so go on heaping up till Death, as greedy an accumulator as themselves, gathers them into his garner!”
― Samuel Richardson, quote from Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady
“This was the kid who used to toddle over to my bed at 6 o’ clock in the morning every weekend morning to pull on my blankets so I’d get up and watch cartoons with him. This was the kid who once made me play Hungry Hungry Hippos for an hour straight, until I thought my hands were going to fall off from slamming down those dumb little levers to make the hippos’ heads move. This was the kid who had spent an entire days at a time begging me to play Chutes and Ladders with him. And now he was feeling too sick to play with me.”
― Jordan Sonnenblick, quote from Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie
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