67
" In retrospect, of course, everyone should have expected this outcome. We should have seen that a story begun with such one-sided, unconscious joviality - jewel-colored liqueurs and Portuguese wine on a rain-washed Rhodesian October morning - would end less than a decade later in defeat and heartbreak. But in the glow of love, in the heat of battle, in the cushioned denial of the present, how few have the wisdom to look forward with unclouded hindsight. Not my parents, certainly. Not most of us. But most of us also don't pay so dearly for our prejudices, our passions, our mistakes. Lots of places, you can harbor the most ridiculous, the most ruining, the most intolerant beliefs and be hurt by nothing more than your own thoughts. "
― Alexandra Fuller , Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
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" Whether out of desperation, ignorance or hostility, humans have an unerring capacity to ignore one another’s sacred traditions and to defile one another’s hallowed grounds: the Palawa Aborigines lost on Waternish, the Macdonalds trapped in St. Francis Cave on Eigg, the MacLeods burned in Trumpan Church, the Boers dying in British concentration camps, thousands of Kikuyu perishing during the Mau Mau, the Rucks family hacked to death in Kenya’s White Highlands, Adrian’s grave desecrated. Surely until all of us own and honor one another’s dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace. "
― Alexandra Fuller