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
Alexandra Fuller
Born place: The United Kingdom
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“Hey!” I exclaimed, seeing Khol standing beside my bed with my pillow in his hands. His tall frame seemed to take up more room in the light of day, and his dark auburn hair looked like fire in the morning sun. His mere physical presence in the same room as me still caused my body to shiver with excitement. Damn . . . not good.”
― D.T. Dyllin, quote from Hidden Gates
“When you love someone, they deserve to know the truth”
― Lorna Seilstad, quote from Making Waves
“We are all very much alike in France in this respect; we still remain knights, knights of love and fortune, since God has been abolished whose bodyguard we really were. But nobody can ever get woman out of our hearts; there she is, and there she will remain, and we love her, and shall continue to love her, and go on committing all kinds of follies on her account as long as there is a France on the map of Europe; and even if France were to be wiped off the map, there would always be Frenchmen left.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“Despite what you may believe, habit research shows that dramatic changes are actually easier for us to manage, both physically and psychologically.”
― quote from It Starts with Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways
“I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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