Home > Author > Breyten Breytenbach
1 " Even ivory towers need central heating. "
― Breyten Breytenbach
2 " History is a succession of things that ought never to have happened, and the writing act is a kind of revenge against this. "
― Breyten Breytenbach , Intimate Stranger
3 " The recognition and the acceptance of the Other's humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to -know- that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows. "
4 " Rhythm, repetition, making patterns--these are not only important devices for shaping the strange and abstract instrument/object we call a poem or a story, but they are craved as well because of our primordial need for reassurance, the sense of security we get from moving over the known. A mystery doesn't lose power in revisiting. Writing is not just to know, it is also to console. We need to be reminded that we are part of the obscure rhythm of birth and decade. It is the humming that matters. "
5 " To be an African is not a choice, it is a condition… To be an African is not through lack of being integrated in Europe… neither is it from regret of the crimes perpetrated by “my people”… No, it is simply the only opening I have for making use of all my sense and capabilities… The African earth was the first to speak. I have been pronounced once and for all. "
6 " Leaving traces of ourselves, as in creative productivity, could then be seen as part of the definition of consciousness for us as well. We know that in order to progress we must stretch for something just out of reach--if only for a life that will be more compassionate and decent than the cruelty, paranoia, greed, narrow corporatism, or narcissism we mostly indulge in and find such ample justification for. And so we dream. "
7 " Glissant: “For me, the arrival is the moment where all the components of humanity – not just the African ones – consent to the idea that it is possible to be one and multiple at the same time; that you can be yourself and the Other; that you can be the Same and the Different. When that battle ... is won, a great many accidents in human history ... will be abolished. "
― Breyten Breytenbach , Parool / Parole: Versamelde Toesprake/Collected Speeches
8 " And gradually we will rot like old ships or treesBut keep Pain far from Me o Lord "
― Breyten Breytenbach , In Africa Even the Flies Are Happy: Selected Poems, 1964-1977
9 " Sometimes, fiction tells a truth that history cannot. "
10 " The story of mankind is the nomadic search for many, many truths along harsh roads bordered with flesh and bones and the apparitions of truths long since eaten by birds; it is looking for truths to fill a grumbling stomach, and spitting them out like pebbles when they have lost their flavor. "
