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Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood QUOTES

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood QUOTES

1 " I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. “What if…” “If only…” “I wonder what would have…” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

2 " Relationships are built in the silences. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

3 " It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

4 " he way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

5 " The hood is also a low-stress, comfortable life. All your mental energy goes into getting by, so you don’t have to ask yourself any of the big questions. Who am I? Who am I supposed to be? Am I doing enough? In the hood you can be a forty-year-old man living in your mom’s house asking people for money and it’s not looked down on. You never feel like a failure in the hood, because someone’s always worse off than you, and you don’t feel like you need to do more, because the biggest success isn’t that much higher than you, either. It allows you to exist in a state of suspended animation. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

6 " That was my mom. Don't fight the system. Mock the system. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

7 " But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

8 " The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

9 " The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

10 " When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

11 " Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

12 " I became a chameleon. My color didn't change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

13 " you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either hate them or love them, but that’s not how people are. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

14 " You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad. Where you either hate them or love them. But that's not how people are. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

15 " Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. You will face more hate and ridicule and ostracism than you can even begin to fathom. People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive. That is what happened to me in Eden Park. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

16 " The dogs left with us and we walked. I sobbed the whole way home, still heartbroken. My mom had no time for my whining.
“Why are you crying?!”
“Because Fufi loves another boy.”
“So? Why would that hurt you? It didn’t cost you anything. Fufi’s here. She still loves you. She’s still your dog. So get over it.”
Fufi was my first heartbreak. No one has ever betrayed me more than Fufi. It was a valuable lesson to me. The hard thing was understanding that Fufi wasn’t cheating on me with another boy. She was merely living her life to the fullest. Until I knew that she was going out on her own during the day, her other relationship hadn’t affected me at all. Fufi had no malicious intent.
I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal. They’ll come to me angry and crying and talking about how they’ve been cheated on and lied to, and I feel for them. I understand what they’re going through. I sit with them and buy them a drink and I say, “Friend, let me tell you the story of Fufi. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

17 " In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

18 " In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

19 " My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

20 " People say all the time that they’d do anything for the people they love. But would you really? Would you do anything? Would you give everything? I don’t know that a child knows that kind of selfless love. A mother, yes. A mother will clutch her children and jump from a moving car to keep them from harm. She will do it without thinking. But I don’t think the child knows how to do that, not instinctively. It’s something the child has to learn. "

― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood