Mazisi Kunene
I believe in the great dayWhich will make our paths meet:I shall wake then from the desertSeeing you approach with pots filled with water. — Mazisi Kunene, from “A Farewell,” Zulu Poems. (Africana Publishing Corporation 1970)
Category: South-African Culture
Iain S. Thomas
That’s what it feels like when you touch me. Like millions of tiny universes being born and then dying in the space between your finger and my skin. Sometimes I forget. — Iain S. Thomas, I Wrote This For You . (Central Avenue Publishing December 1, 2011)
Nadine Gordimer
I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn. — Nadine Gordimer, The House Gun. (Trafalgar Square; First Edition edition February 18, 1999)
Roy Macnab
Said he, the word is a faithless flirt,Not a lover to your art,Deceiving with a warm coquetryYour dreamfilled youthA spidery dilettante, fondlingYour silver web of thought. — Roy Macnab, from “The Word,” Testament of a South African (Fortune Press, 1947)
Nelson Mandela
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. ― Nelson Mandela
Jacques Coetzee
And if now by the flashlight of the mind I was to look for you, conjure you as I have come to know you, you would split into a thousand points of memory, disjointed bits unable to cohere. But if I sweep these aside and wait in the rich, silent dark, and listen, forgetting what… Continue reading Jacques Coetzee
Iain S. Thomas
There are a million ways to bleed. But you are by far my favourite. — Iain S. Thomas, I Wrote This For You. (Central Avenue Publishing, October 24, 2017)
Barbara Grenfell Fairhead
What I remember of the day: soft rain; and the touch of our fingertips’ shy coupling… and the sweet intimacy of our pilgrimage over broken ground and the way you listened with your body leaning into my voice and hearing so deeply far deeper than words the tender heart-beat of unspoken things. — Barbara Grenfell… Continue reading Barbara Grenfell Fairhead
B. G. Bowers
Sometimes you have to cross the boundaries of Death in order to discover the meaning of Life. ― B. G. Bowers, Death and Life. (PaperFields Press; Revised edition, December 21, 2014)
J. M. Coetzee
But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness… — J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K. (Vintage Books, March 28, 2005) Originally published 1983,
The Vale of Soul-Making 