Scribbling the Cat Quotes

“What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible--from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin--to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't know if it's even useful to try.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“It should not be possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips.... p 72”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“It should not be physically possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“Toasted tobacco, no additives,' I said. 'Yum. Tastes like childhood.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotions to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible - from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin - to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't even know if it's useful to try.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“I landed on a carpet of moss and looked up at pieces of torn sky breaking through a dense roof of foliage.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“The moon, which would be full within the week, pulsed huge and silver in a deep black sky. The lake, black and secret and long, stretched out as far as I could see, joining with the sky in a seamless circle of darkness.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“He was as fragile as wood smoke, barely a memory against the landscape.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible - from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin - to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't know if it's even useful to try.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“A gray cloud swung its belly over the brush at the summit and fat drops of rain burst on the windscreen and splattered into the car and dotted up and down my arms. I hung out of the car and let the rain fall on my face.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“Do you want a piece of advice from your old father?"
"Not really."
"Don't look back so much or you'll get wiped out on the tree in front of you.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“The two of us lurching on an unlikely journey up a lonely road in the dark, thick beginning of a Mozambique night. As our pickup churned over rocks and through thick sand, the engine drowned out the night cries of the cicadas, the crickets, and the nightjars. Behind us, a plume of dust burned pink in our rear lights.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“It was the time of night that precedes dawn and is without perspective or reason. It was the hour when regret and fear overwhelm hope and courage and when all that is ugly in us is magnified and when we are most panic-stricken by what we have lost, and what we have almost lost, and what we fear we might lose.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

“the odd small goat, surprised by so much unaccustomed water, died from disgust.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier