Bitter Fruit Quotes

“He stands on the stone table and selects a large fig, bites into the skin, then opens it with his fingers. He thinks of a woman's sex, ancient and eternal, no young girl would have such gritty sweetness. Was this not perhaps the fruit that got Adam and Eve thrown out of Eden? Who would want to give up an unblemished state of immortality for the insipid apple?”
― Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit

“Lydia shook her head in disbelief, the bewilderment of suddenly finding out that her life, her son' life, that of her mother and father, her whole family, was fragile, subject to someone else's whim, their freedom dependent on how much people thought they knew or did not know.”
― Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit

“Perhaps history had dwindled away. Their lives, Lydia’s and Silas’s, the whole country’s, had become ordinary things. Not worth recording any longer, not worth the few precious moments of her busy day.”
― Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit

“The sun pressed down on his eyelids, a hot illumination that would soon make him feel drowsy. This must be the way blind people absorbed light into their heads: raising their faces to the sun, to Ra, god of the blind. Everyone needed real light, not just the artificial, thought-up light of the imagination.”
― Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit