Double Negative Quotes

“Even the leading lights of apartheid, the men who had made and enforced the laws, were starting to come clean, not just recanting but voicing the doubts they claimed to have been harbouring all along. If the social engineers had never really believed, why should the fitters and turners keep the faith? Soon there would be no believers left.
People were not lying either: they were merely inventing. perhaps the freight of the past had to be lightened if the flimsy walls of the new South Africa were not to buckle. How much past can the present bear? there was already talk of a Truth Commission. But people are constitutionally unmade for the truth. Good, reliable fictions, that's what the doctor ordered.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative

“At the side of the house, where a bougainvillea growing on to the roof made a sort of arbor, a dozen skulls were fixed to the wall. Animal skulls, pale as driftwood, bleached to sea-shades against the powder-blue plaster. The centerpiece was obviously the skull of a horse. There were others whose shapes suggested the flesh in which they had once been embedded: a dog, a rabbit, and more I could only guess at - rat, lamb, lizard, mole. The way they were arranged, with the horse in the middle and the lesser creatures above and below, each in its proper station, the beaked birds under the rafters, the head of the dog at a height that invited you to scratch its ear although its jaw was dropped to snap at your ankle, made them less like trophies than ghosts, passing through the wall that instant, hungry for meat and grass, for air and company, breaking back into the realm of the living. One of the skulls had small, pointed horns, darkly whorled, as shiny as enamel. Suspended in the eye socket of the horse was a pocket watch with its hands hanging down, defeated.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative