“There were lots of ways to lose your farm. In the beginning it was mostly violent. Now, though, the process had become highly formal, and in many ways more chilling. Ordinary citizens who supported the ruling party and claimed they wanted to farm simply applied to the Registrar of Deeds for a farm and, if approved, got what was called an offer letter. This applicant, known as an A2 farmer, simply drove onto the farm he had been allocated, handed his letter to the farmer if he was still on the land, and told him he was the new owner. “It’s like winning the lottery, except you don’t even have to buy a ticket,” Dad told me.”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans had starved to death or died of disease under Robert Mugabe; the more incredible story was how so many millions managed to survive. They refused to become victims.”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“It was happening again: everyone wanted their story told.”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“My father couldn’t believe what the soldier was telling him in that phone call: “Come on, Walter, what do you mean they’re diamond dealers?” “Mr. Rogers, let me be certain: our town is overrun! There are thousands! I have arrested many! Some are drunk, and when I ask from where they are coming they all say that secret place, that place in the bush where they have beer, that place they call Drifters!” Dad felt a flush of outlaw pride—followed by something approximating panic. The last thing he needed was Walter and his CIO comrades raiding his lodge. But Walter must have sensed his concern. “Don’t worry, Mr. Rogers,” he said quietly, conspiratorially. “I instruct them to keep very quiet about your place. Very quiet …” He pressed a finger to his lips. It wasn’t hard to meet a diamond dealer at Drifters. You just had to walk into the bar. I”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“We’ve killed twelve hundred, we’re going to win the war! We’ve killed twelve hundred, we’re going to win the war!” I was nine years old. I”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“Inflation had spun out of control as a direct result of the land invasions. In breaking its own laws and dispossessing its own citizens, the state not only destroyed the sector of the economy that provided 50 percent of its foreign revenue, but it also frightened away foreign investors. Without foreign currency to pay its bills, the government simply started printing money. Then more money. And still more. Once they started, they couldn’t stop; it became an addiction.”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“They had held power for more than twenty-six years, they controlled every aspect of the state to the extent that you couldn’t openly say what you thought, and yet someone else was always to blame. Belligerent victimhood is a mark of tyranny, an ugly and dangerous thing to behold.”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“Belligerent victimhood is a mark of tyranny, an ugly and dangerous thing to behold. The”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“Now Mugabe has a policy to ‘look east.’ To look to the Chinese to invest in us. What is a Chinese going to understand about Africa? It will take another hundred years! Mugabe’s policies are denial. The base of the Zimbabwean economy is Western investment for over one hundred years since colonialism. The fabric of this economy is investment.”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“What did we do before candles?” went the local joke. “Electricity.” The joke became dated fast, because soon shops ran out of candles. My”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“It is one of the strange discoveries a man makes that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. —GRAHAM GREENE, The Power and the Glory”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“You want to know the real reason for the invasions?” said Hammy, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. “The government had run the economy so badly into the ground that they needed a distraction for all the people without jobs.”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“he’d bought his farm in 1985 after attending a meeting the president called to ask white farmers to stay in the country. Incredibly, it is estimated that by 2000, 76 percent of white-owned farms had in fact been purchased after independence, and it became illegal after 1987 for anyone to sell a farm without first offering it to the government.”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“Commercial farming makes up only twenty-eight percent of this country’s land. But there’s a black farmers’ union that represent six percent of that. The Development Trust, which is government, has three percent. There are black tenant farmers with four percent. And Forestry has one percent. That leaves whites with about fourteen percent of the country’s land. Doesn’t sound the same as seventy percent, does it? And that fourteen percent produced about sixty-five percent of all agricultural produce and fifty percent of foreign earnings, and employed or supported almost two million people. But all you ever heard about was us greedy white farmers.” Everyone”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
“Ich weiß nicht, ob die verdummte Unterhaltung nach und nach dem kollektiven Intellekt unserer Nation geschadet hat oder ob die geistige Faulheit des Publikums zuerst da war und wir sie nur bedient haben.”
― quote from Torture the Artist. Joey Goebel
“Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before – whether or not it is actually true. In one study, subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in previous weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as true, even if they swore they had never heard it before. This is the case even when the experimenter tells the subjects that the sentences they are about to hear are false: despite this, mere exposure to an idea is enough to boost its believability upon later contact. The illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.”
― David Eagleman, quote from Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,' said Alice, 'Because I'm not myself you see.”
― Lewis Carroll, quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
“This is why, rather than go on talking, I felt the need to transform the things to be said into a cone of light hurled at a hundred miles an hour, to transform myself into this cone of light moving over the superhighway, because it is certain that such a signal can be received and understood by her without being lost in the ambiguous disorder of secondary vibrations, just as I, to receive and understand the things she has to say to me, would like them to be only (rather, I would like her to be only) this cone of light I see advancing on the superhighway at a speed (I'm guessing, at a glance) of eighty or ninety. What counts is communicating the indispensable, skipping all the superfluous, reducing ourselves to essential communication, to a luminous signal that moves in a given direction, abolishing the complexity of our personalities and situations and facial expressions, leaving them in the shadowy container that the headlights carry behind them and conceal. The Y I love is really that moving band of luminous rays, and all the rest of her can remain implicit; and the me that she can love, the me that has the power of entering that circuit of exaltation which is her affective life, in the flashing of this pass which, through love of her and with a certain risk, I am now attempting.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“The threads of problems dangled in front of me, and I tried to think of a way to weave them into a solution. I”
― Kiran Millwood Hargrave, quote from The Girl of Ink and Stars
Life in Outer Space
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