Alexandra Fuller > Quotes

“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.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling The Cat

“Cowboy up, cupcake.”
― Alexandra Fuller, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

“How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

“You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

“I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible--from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin--to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't know if it's even useful to try.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling The Cat

“Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both. When I picked up the skulls to add to my growing collection of what Vanessa called "Bobo's smelly pile," the hooked horns fell away from each other and the story of the impalas' death struggle was undone.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

“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.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling The Cat

“It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling The Cat

“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, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

“The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absarb white man's blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattel and the blood from a woman's birthing with equal thirst. It doesn't care.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

“She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

“Toasted tobacco, no additives,' I said. 'Yum. Tastes like childhood.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling The Cat