The Seed and the Sower Quotes

“We may not be able to stop and undo the hard old wrongs of the great world outside, but through you and me no evil shall come either in the unknown where you are going, or in this imperfect and haunted dimension of awareness through which I move.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“The only death the spirit recognizes is the denial of birth to that which strives to be born: those realities in ourselves that we have not allowed to live. The real ghost is a strange, persistent beggar at a narrow door asking to be born; asking, again and again, for admission at the gateway of our lives. Such ghosts I had, and thus, beyond all reason, I continued to be haunted.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“Had I not learnt lately that death is not something that happens at the end of our life? It is imprisonment in one moment of time, confinement in one sharp uncompromising deed or aspect or ourselves. Death is exclusion from renewal of our present-day selves.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“None of us, he claimed, were pure enough to claim a special solution for ourselves out of ‘our own human and time context’.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“But I had their instant, magnetic liking for my enemy and before I knew where, or even who I was, I had become prisoner of the effect I had on them. [...] I was shackled not so much to my good looks, as to what people, after seeing me, first imagined and then through their imaginations compelled me to be.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and The Sower

“Wind and spirit, earth and being, rain and doing, lightning and awareness imperative, thunder and the word, seed and sower, all are one: and it is necessary only for man to ask for his seed to be chosen and to pray for the sower within to sow it through the deed and act of himself, and then the harvest for all will be golden and great.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“In the spring,
Obeying the August spirits
I went to fight the enemy.
In the Fall,
Returning I beg the spirits,
To receive also the enemy.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“What he meant by ‘awareness’ was perhaps a sense of the as yet unimagined wholeness of life; a recognition that one could live freely only on the frontiers of one’s being where the known was still contained in the infinite unknown, and where there could be a continual crossing and re-crossing of tentative borders, like lone hunters returning from perilous sojourns in great forests. It was, to put it pictorially, he said, a way of living not only by moonlight or sunlight, but also by starlight.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower