The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life
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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between March 25 - April 1, 2018
6%
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Still air has no value; it has only to move, however, and then immediately acquires a price.
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An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat—time annihilates him.
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Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy toward it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.
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Our imaginations hungrily and greedily absorb every tiny bit of sensational news, the slightest portent of peril, the faintest whiff of gunpowder, and instantly inflate these signs to monstrous, paralyzing proportions.
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A human being always dies alone; the moment of death is the loneliest moment of his life. “Mass
42%
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They were divided by their struggle for power, united in their lies.
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These armed encounters between youngsters are particularly fierce and bloody, because a child does not have the instinct for self-preservation, does not feel dread or comprehend death, does not experience the fear that only maturity will evoke.
78%
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History is so often the product of thoughtlessness: it is the offspring of human stupidity, the fruit of benightedness, idiocy, and folly.
79%
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We are in a world in which misery condemns some to death and transforms others into monsters. The former are the victims, the latter are the executioners. There is no one else.
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Night envelops us like a wet, burning sheet.
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Man cannot survive longer than his shadow.
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“The desert will teach you one thing,” a nomadic Saharan merchant told me in Niamey. “That there is something that one can desire and love more than a woman. And that is water.”