Winter in Johannesburg Quotes

“Yes, I know that now that there is truth in beauty and beauty in truth. My nature is to be depressive and come out of it and write, and enjoy writing and feeling as if I have a passion and excitement and love and euphoria for it and then I go 'back to sleep again' where I can eat and watch television and not work, not be productive and then just as if a magic switch is turned on I can do it all over again. I don't mind the being depressed part. Sometimes it seems to fuel me. The anger though is gone now that was there in my twenties and even earlier in my youth. Your voice is Tolstoy’s, Hemingway’s, Updike’s, Styron’s, Mcewan’s, Greene’s, Fugard’s, Kundera’s, Rilke’s while I am the incarnate of Radcliffe Hall crossing both genders effortlessly. You betray nothing. There is son in the picture. A small boy but you don’t introduce him to me. Obsessions are unhealthy creatures. They make you mentally ill, emotionally unstable; leave you with a chemistry of deep sadness in your life. I have my writing. It keeps me from disintegrating into fractions. I should stop now before I begin to make myself cry.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg

“The winter in Johannesburg only come out to play at the weekend, in the evenings during the week, especially in a Friday night. They go out for drinks but during the day they work their fingers to the bone like gulls never-ending swooping through the air. Their heads are like radios filled with links to music, drama and news. When men wounded them, break their hearts, leave them still smitten or stone cold it feels like a jab with a knife to their spirit.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg

“You're staring blankly at the fifties now. I'm thirty-ish. Once you were my teacher, my master and I was your student, your apprentice. College years long gone and a decade between us. I think of you every winter and my heart still stops dead, my mouth opening and shutting as if you were still here. I lost something when I found you, something ancient.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg

“At the end of the sky I am a swimmer. In the water I can become a child again, splashing, sighing, holding my breath until enough is enough, I come up choking, my lungs needful of a fresh supply of air.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg

“For years you've been laying a table for one.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg

“Bessie shifted with the passage of time, with the dial of a clock. I lay here wishing you were here, but you're not. The symbiosis of this relationship is incomplete. He stirred in his sleep, put his arm around her waist and breathed deeply in his sleep. She imagined that he was finally in all these weeks speaking to her, that recognition was there now - he was dead to her but not to another woman.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg

“Do ghosts have to be forgiven? All I remember of the funeral is, 'Your husband was a brilliant man.' Was that all the comfort that I had to draw on? I wanted to announce, 'Yes he was a brilliant man and now like all the great minds he is dead.' Sometimes I cry myself to sleep, sniffling, stifling my sobs in my pillows. Sometimes I fall asleep the minute my head hits the pillow and find my arms reaching across the other side of the bed for Kenny so I can whisper sweet nothings in his ear as he falls asleep.

I reached out for the bottle of sleeping tablets on my bedside table and swallowed them one by one.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg

“The beach was one of my favorite places to go to. It was a good place to come and think. When the tide recedes the waves go with it. The dark sea waters are like pulsing, vibrating shadows. The sand is its friend. Whenever I felt lonely I remembered those days.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg

“Whenever I feel lonely I remembered those days. My mother walking ahead of me, barefoot, her hair blowing in the wind, across her mouth, a pair of her soft shoes in her hand, yet she still looked beautiful and elegant to me. Her glasses perched on the end of her nose.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg

“Does she ever feel lonely as I do? The silence is dead in the rooms of our house, made up of impoverished ghosts, their voices clanging like the sailing song of a wind chime in the wind through orphaned autumn leaves grounded in my head. She frustrates me like a blue fly I cannot swat, gut or trap. I cannot pull its wings off, disguise my frustration in a plume of smoke like my younger brother and his friends. My father and I have retreated to the room that we now share. I lay sprawled out on the single bed watching him sleep. My mother sleeps in my sister's room now. She sleeps enshrouded in the dark under the dense cover of blankets over her head. Her door is closed.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg

“What motivated me to write was a pale September, walking to and fro from school, a hail shower in Swaziland, a forest of flowers, autumn in Port Elizabeth, the falling of the leaves, the wind in the trees, the golden threads were caught up and that ran in my sister's hair, children caught in poverty, abandonment, neglect, malnourished with their distended bellies, the weight of driftwood, seawater, fish and chips with my mother after our walk on the beach, talk of angels in war, drought, famine, hunger, the spitting, thin rain or being drenched by a downpour, harbingers, outsiders and insiders.”
― Abigail George, Winter in Johannesburg