Vanessa Woods · 278 pages
Rating: (1.7K votes)
“We do terrible things to the ones we love. We cheat and lie and betray them, for thirty pieces of silver or our own selfish hearts. The only way love endures is because of one simple gift. Forgiveness.”
― Vanessa Woods, quote from Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo
“When I talk to people about what makes us human, some people say it’s our tears. Because we are the only ones who weep, only we can feel true sorrow. When I hear this, I remember Isiro’s face, her anguished eyes as she cried for Mikeno, how she screamed at the keepers with her teeth bared and pushed at the poles. How she dashed back to his body and dug her fingers into his chest as if the strength of her grip could bring him back. There is sorrow without tears. Of course there is.”
― Vanessa Woods, quote from Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo
“It is a cumulative tragedy, the same tragedy that blights the entire country. With so many dead bodies, how do you begin to rebuild? How do you trust enough to hope? And how do you hold on to life when it no longer seems worth living?”
― Vanessa Woods, quote from Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo
“If there are those you love, whoever or wherever you are, hold them. Find them and hold them as tightly as you can. Resist their squirming and impatience and uncomfortable laughter, and just feel their heart throbbing against yours. Give thanks that for this moment, for this one precious moment, they are here, they are with you, and they know they are utterly, completely, entirely loved.”
― Vanessa Woods, quote from Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo
“When Joseph Conrad saw how Europeans behaved in Congo in 1890, he described them as “reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage…To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” More than a hundred years later, not much has changed.”
― Vanessa Woods, quote from Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo
“There is something in the eyes of a bonobo that you don’t see in those of a tiger or a shark. They are human eyes, but not the cautious glimpse of a stranger you pass on a city street, or the pretended interest of a shrink you’re paying $300 an hour. Or someone you think you recognize but don’t. The eyes of a bonobo are the eyes of your best friend or a lover or a priest. They see into you. They see nothing else. They invite confession.”
― Vanessa Woods, quote from Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo
“The power of sadness has always amazed me.”
― Vanessa Woods, quote from Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo
“The Chinese say that love is balance. He is the water to my fire.The chimpanzee to my bonobo. And when I am mired in life’s ugliness, when I can see only what’s decaying both inside and outside my own head, he is the blindness I need, the mindless faith in happy endings.”
― Vanessa Woods, quote from Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo
“Claudine tells me there was fluid around Bolombe’s heart. That the stress of his capture was too much. I always thought hearts were broken, but apparently they drown.”
― Vanessa Woods, quote from Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo
Vanessa Woods
Born place: in Australia
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“Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life. A”
― Richard Ford, quote from Independence Day
“A sacrifice ever remembered.
Never forgotten.
Another day we live.
A sacrifice for you. Only for you.
And so shall it be,
For evermore.
Paviamma”
― Mary E. Pearson, quote from The Heart of Betrayal
“The disaster at Johnstown was one that need never have happened and a powerful reminder that it can be terribly dangerous, even perilous, to assume that because people hold positions of responsibility they are therefore acting responsibly.”
― David McCullough, quote from The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
“The wolf was not far away. After only a short time, he crested a nearby hill. His eyes blazing yellow fire. Fierce. For his mistress called. There she knelt. Queenly and yet so wild. Arrow set to bow - spilling out a bloody light.
At the sight of her, passion filled him. It rose in his gut, swelled his chest, then burst out of his throat. It overwhelmed the air and beat against the starry roof. The howl filled the mounds, rang out through the Vale and then rolled into Minonowe.
She had called him and here was his answer.
The spiders were out there. Running. With Luthiel, he would hunt them.”
― Robert Fanney, quote from The War of Mists
“Death must be fought with life, and that means courage and that means joy,”
― Nancy Farmer, quote from The Sea of Trolls
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