106 Quotes by Alexandra Fuller

There aren’t enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don’t do it for the money or because they want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breathe or eat or love.

You can’t rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn’t. You know how it is. You have to leave before the rains come, or it’s too late.

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin – when we’re dancing with our own skeletons – our words might be all that’s left of us.

But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself – maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow.

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.

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I’ve never heard of before.

Because of all the kinds of love there are out there – romantic, passionate, parental, spousal, brotherly – the love that is touted as most unassailable, complicit, and colluding is the love between sisters.

In ways I don’t entirely have the words for, an experience, thought or a lesson isn’t real for me until I’ve written down.