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Bryce Courtenay

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Bryce Courtenay


Born
in Johannesburg, South Africa
August 14, 1933

Died
November 22, 2012

Website

Genre


I was born illegitimately in 1933 in South Africa and spent my early childhood years in a small town deep in the heart of the Lebombo mountains.

It was a somewhat isolated community and I grew up among farm folk and the African people. At the age of five I was sent to a boarding school which might be better described as a combination orphanage and reform school, where I learned to box - though less as a sport and more as a means to stay alive.

But I survived to return to a small mountain town named Barberton in the North Eastern part of the country.

Here I met Doc, a drunken German music teacher who spent the next few years filling my young mind with the wonders of nature as we roamed the high mountains. His was the best education I was ever t
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Quotes by Bryce Courtenay  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.”
Bryce Courtenay

“First with the head, then with the heart.”
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow, and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky. The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking. Most people you encounter will be vines; when you are a young plant they are very dangerous. Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life.”
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

Polls

November 2019 New School Poll

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, 1951, 160 pages
 
  80 votes, 30.2%

Stoner by John Williams, 1965, 278 pages
 
  65 votes, 24.5%

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, 1985, 352 pages
 
  42 votes, 15.8%

 
  39 votes, 14.7%

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, 1980, 219 pages
 
  28 votes, 10.6%

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, 1989, 518 pages
 
  11 votes, 4.2%

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