The Power of One

by Bryce Courtenay

Mediocrity is the best camouflage known to man.

One thing is certain in life. Just when things are going well, soon after they are certain to go wrong. It’s just the way things are meant to be.

I have found in life that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end.

I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me,

Obviously being a Jew was a very profitable business. Maybe I could be one when I grew up.

‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. There comes a time in everything when you don’t know something.’

‘It’s good to be a little frightened. It’s good to respect your opponent. It keeps you sharp.

Hoppie’s words were like seed pods with wings. They flew straight out of his mouth and into my head where they germinated in the rich, fertile, receptive soil of my mind.

‘Never forget, Peekay, sometimes, very occasionally, you do your best boxing with your mouth.’

the air was as still as a dead man’s breath

had just witnessed the final move in a perfectly wrought plan where small defeats big. First with the head and then with the heart.

‘Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.’

‘Sadness has a season and will pass.’

In the country food is a continuous preoccupation, not simply a pause to refuel. Country people know the sweat that goes into an ear of corn, a pail of milk, a churn of butter, bread warm from the oven

‘Life is all beginnings and ends. Nothing stays the same,

Nothing is unexplained. Nature is a chain reaction. One thing follows the other, everything is dependent on something else. The smallest is as important as the largest.

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 metres through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky.’ He looked at me and continued, ‘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.’

‘To be smart is not a sin. But to be smart and not use it, that, Peekay, is a sin.

To say a man is a German what is that? Does it tell you if he is a good man? Or a bad man? No, my friend, it tells you nothing about a man to say he is German. A man must think what he is inside,

why are the peace lovers always the first to suffer in the war?

A man is only free when he is free in his heart.

I learned that the greatest camouflage of all is consistency. If you do something often enough and at the same time in the same way, you become invisible.

‘Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.’

Racism does not diminish with brains, it’s a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn’t necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!’

shedding tears which fell like drops of liquid silver