11 Quotes by André Alexis

Violence has reasons, that reason itself cannot know

The group of people in front of her was jovial and paid her no attention. The group behind was much the same. She was alone without being alone.

Prince's words had not been meant as a warning. Rather, he had been playing. He had been pretending. He had been speaking for speaking's sake. Could there be a more despicable use for words?

... she refused to allow anyone - even Miguel - to refer to Majnoun as 'her' dog.- I'm as much his as he's mine, she'd insist.Her friends - and her husband - thought this an annoying eccentricity. Majnoun knew what she meant - that she was not his master - and he was grateful. But in his heart he felt as if he did belong to her, in the sense that he was a part of Nira and she a part of him.

so little of what anything means comes through words.

Death was in every fibre of these creatures. It was hidden in their languages and at the root of their civilizations. You could hear it in the sounds they made and see it in the way they moved. It darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair.

Benjy's greatest wish was for a place where the echelon was clear to all, where the powerful cared for the weak and the weak gave their respect without being coerced. He longed for balance, order, right and pleasure.

He was a committed leader, capable of - or prone to - instinctive decisions. More: he could put aside thought in the service of forceful action. But in quiet moments his sensitivity sometimes led him to reconsider his own behaviour. In other words, Atticus had a conscience, and it was this that led him to what some would call faith.

The city had been built by people from innumerable elsewheres. It was a chaos of cultures ordered only by its long streets. It belonged to no one and never would, or maybe it was a million cities in one, unique to each of its inhabitants, belonging to whoever walked its streets.