Quotes from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

“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

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“إذا أردنا أن نعرف فلاناً فنحن نسأل : " ما قصته - قصته الحقيقية الأعمق ؟ - " لأن كل واحد منا هو سيرة وقصة . كل واحد منا هو حكاية فريدة يتم تركيبها باستمرار ودون وعي بواسطتنا ومن خلالنا وفينا من خلال إدراكاتنا ومشاعرنا وأفكارنا وأفعالنا وليس أقله بواسطة حديثنا وحكاياتنا المنطوقة . نحن لا نختلف عن بعضنا بعضاً كثيراً بيولوجياً وفسيولوجياً ، أما تاريخياً ، كقصص ، فكل من فريد !”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Holding on to some part of your past even if it means also holding on to the pain of never again having it. That pain is less horrible than the pain of forgetting.”
― Sara Raasch, quote from Snow Like Ashes

“The lottery is a tax on poor people and on people who can’t do math. Rich people and smart people would be in the line if the lottery were a real wealth-building tool, but the truth is that the lottery is a rip-off instituted by our government. This is not a moral position; it is a mathematical, statistical fact. Studies show that the zip codes that spend four times what anyone else does on lottery tickets are those in lower-income parts of town. The lottery, or gambling of any kind, offers false hope, not a ticket out.”
― Dave Ramsey, quote from The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness

“Unlike its human counterparts, an army of zombies is completely independent of support. It will not require food,ammunition, or medical attention. It will not succumb to panic, desertion, or out-and-out mutiny. Like the virus that gave it life, this undead force will continue to grow, spreading across the body of this planet until there is nothing left to devour. Where would you go? What would you do?”
― Max Brooks, quote from The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

“His secretary of many years’ standing, Theodora Bosanquet, was struck by this persistent aspect of the Jamesian sensibility: ‘When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed, defenceless children of light.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

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