The Lighthearted Quest Quotes

“Spain really is practically Africa; down the southeast coast even the butterflies are the same.”
― Ann Bridge, A Lighthearted Quest

“There are two things which everyone must do on the roof of the Café de France: look at the view of the High Atlas, and eat Cornes de Gazelles, long slender curved cakes of ground almonds, with their coffee.”
― Ann Bridge, A Lighthearted Quest

“My thought is, that if the Moslems of our colonial Empire do not gently, little by little, become converted, a nationalist movement analogous to that in Turkey will arise; an intellectual élite will be formed in the big cities, taught à la française without having either French hearts or minds, an élite which will have lost its own Islamic faith, but which will keep the label in order to influence the masses. . . . Nationalist sentiments will be exalted by this élite, which when it finds an opportunity (such as would be provided by difficulties threatening France from without or from within) will use Islam as a lever to rouse the ignorant multitudes, and will try to create an independent African Moslem Empire.”
― Ann Bridge, A Lighthearted Quest

“There you have it—the ‘not knowing the people sufficiently well’ has all along been one of the major French mistakes,”
― Ann Bridge, A Lighthearted Quest

“In 1911 there was no airmail, spinning a deplorably rapid web of postal deliveries all over North Africa—still less was there the even more lamentable diffusion of ideas by the wireless. Today every small town in Morocco can, and does, listen to false, vain, and utterly subversive broadcasts in Arabic from Cairo radio.”
― Ann Bridge, A Lighthearted Quest

“Intellectual mistakes, spiritual mistakes, emotional mistakes—all intangible, but how appallingly potent and dangerous intangibles can be! That is what the modern world so fatally tends to forget, obsessed as it is by material and economic progress. Spiritual values?—idealistic rubbish! But they are the ultimate ones, even in things political.”
― Ann Bridge, A Lighthearted Quest