Alexandra Fuller · 315 pages
Rating: (43.3K votes)
“How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“This is not a full circle. It's Life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we all make to get on with it.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absorb white man's blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattle and the blood from a woman's birthing with equal thirst. It doesn't care.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both. When I picked up the skulls to add to my growing collection of what Vanessa called "Bobo's smelly pile," the hooked horns fell away from each other and the story of the impalas' death struggle was undone.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself -- maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“Well-bred' ensured buckled noses, high-arched feet, a predisposition to madness, and ... an innate belief in our own unquestioning superiority.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“But this is africa, so hardly anything is normal.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and vulnerable; their doors are flimsy pieces of plyboard or sacks hanging and lank. Children and chickens and dogs scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive through their open, eroding lives.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“All of us are mad and then she adds,smiling, but I'm the only one with a certificate to prove it”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“There is a madman who lives on the road to Mkushi. Every full moon he comes out onto the tarmac and digs a deep trench across the road. Dad would like to find the madman and bring him back to the farm. 'Think what a strong bugger he is, eh?' 'Yes, but you could only get him to work when there was a full moon.' 'Which is twice as hard as any other Zambian.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“The world looks better when your belly is full, brighter and more hopeful. After”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“They drink blood," he tells me.
"Who?"
"Leopards."
"Why?"
"For fun. Leopard beer." He laughs.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“We drink the barely cool locally brewed Mosi from the leaky mildew-smelling fridge, keeping an eye out for UFOs, unidentified floating objects, in the bottles.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“She is gently manic, in a pottering sort of way.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“There is only one time of absolute silence. Halfway between the dark of night and the light of morning, all animals and crickets and birds fall into a profound silence as if pressed quiet by the deep quality of the blackest time of night...This silence is how I know it is not yet dawn, nor is it the middle of the night, but it is the place of no-time, when all things sleep most deeply, when their guard is dozing”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“In the hot, slow time of day when time and sun and thought slow to a dragging, shallow, pale crawl, there is the sound of heat. The grasshoppers and crickets sing and whine. Drying grass crackles. Dogs pant. There is the sound of breath and breathing, of an entire world collapsed under the apathy of the tropics.”
― Alexandra Fuller, quote from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
“Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: ‘Quick! Quick! Quick!’ And the more she destroys, the more she is renewed.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“Belly fat is especially active in this process, contributing to inflammation more than fat stores in other areas (like your buttocks or thighs).”
― quote from It Starts with Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways
“When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“Montaigne says somewhere that in early youth the joy of life lies in the feet.”
― Willa Cather, quote from Lucy Gayheart
“They are only after you. Not to worry. We've got it under control, little one.”
― Candace Knoebel, quote from Born in Flames
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