A Dry White Season Quotes

“I had never been so close to death before.
For a long time, as I lay there trying to clear my mind, I couldn't think coherently at all, conscious only of a terrible, blind bitterness. Why had they singled me out? Didn't they understand? Had everything I'd gone through on their behalf been utterly in vain? Did it really count for nothing? What had happened to logic, meaning and sense?
But I feel much calmer now. It helps to discipline oneself like this, writing it down to see it set out on paper, to try and weigh it and find some significance in it.
Prof Bruwer: There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.
I wanted to help. Right. I meant it very sincerely. But I wanted to do it on my terms. And I am white, and they are black. I thought it was still possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. I thought that to reach out and touch hands across the gulf would be sufficient in itself. But I grasped so little, really: as if good intentions from my side could solve it all. It was presumptuous of me. In an ordinary world, in a natural one, I might have succeeded. But not in this deranged, divided age. I can do all I can for Gordon or scores of others who have come to me; I can imagine myself in their shoes, I can project myself into their suffering. But I cannot, ever, live their lives for them. So what else could come of it but failure?
Whether I like it or not, whether I feel like cursing my own condition or not -- and that would only serve to confirm my impotence -- I am white. This is the small, final, terrifying truth of my broken world. I am white. And because I am white I am born into a state of privilege. Even if I fight the system that has reduced us to this I remain white, and favored by the very circumstances I abhor. Even if I'm hated, and ostracized, and persecuted, and in the end destroyed, nothing can make me black. And so those who are cannot but remain suspicious of me. In their eyes my very efforts to identify myself with Gordon, whit all the Gordons, would be obscene. Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and discover for themselves their integrity and affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption?
On the other hand: what can I do but what I have done? I cannot choose not to intervene: that would be a denial and a mockery not only of everything I believe in, but of the hope that compassion may survive among men. By not acting as I did I would deny the very possibility of that gulf to be bridged.
If I act, I cannot but lose. But if I do not act, it is a different kind of defeat, equally decisive and maybe worse. Because then I will not even have a conscience left.
The end seems ineluctable: failure, defeat, loss. The only choice I have left is whether I am prepared to salvage a little honour, a little decency, a little humanity -- or nothing. It seems as if a sacrifice is impossible to avoid, whatever way one looks at it. But at least one has the choice between a wholly futile sacrifice and one that might, in the long run, open up a possibility, however negligible or dubious, of something better, less sordid and more noble, for our children…
They live on. We, the fathers, have lost.”
― Andre Brink, A Dry White Season

“How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.

Alone. Alone to the very end. I… every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?”
― Andre P. Brink, A Dry White Season

“Sy het haar kop stadig geskud. “Met hom is dit meer as dit. Dis die band self. Die kontinuïteit. ’n Soort vastigheid wat mens gerusstel. Alles om mens kan verander, jy self kan verander, maar solank jy weet daar is iets wat onveranderd voortgaan, soos ’n rivier wat see toe loop, gee dit jou sekuriteit.”
― André P. Brink, 'n Droë wit seisoen

“Daar is net twee soorte waansin waarteen mens op jou hoede moet wees, Ben,” sê hy rustig. “Die een is dat ons alles kan doen. Die ander is dat ons niks kan doen nie.”
― André P. Brink, 'n Droë wit seisoen

“Wat ék dink, is dat mens een keer in jou lewe, net één keer, genoeg in iets moet glo om alles daarvoor op die spel te plaas.”
― André P. Brink, 'n Droë wit seisoen

“Then, one day, you discover that life itself is slipping past and you’re just a bloody parasite, something white and maggot-like, not really a human being, just a thing, a sweet and ineffectual thing. And even if you try to call for help, they don’t understand you. They don’t even hear you. Or they think it’s just a new craze and start doing their best to humour you.”
― André P. Brink, A Dry White Season

“Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and discover for themselves their integrity and affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption?”
― André Brink, A Dry White Season

“Happiness? It was one of the saddest nights of my life, an ageless sadness that insinuated itself into the very heart of this new world and deepened slowly into anguish and agony. There she was sleeping, closer to me than anyone had ever been to me, exposed and available, utterly trusting, at my disposal to love, to look at, to touch, to explore, to enter: and yet, in that peaceful deep sleep more remote than any star, ungraspable, forever, apart. I knew her eyes and the inside of her mouth, her nipples in rest and arousal, every limb of her slight smooth body, every individual finger and toe; I could examine if I wished each secret hair. And yet it amounted to nothing, nothing at all. Our bodies had joined and turned and clasped, and shared the spasms of pleasure and of pain. But having touched, we were again separate; and in her sleep, as she smiled, or whimpered, or lay breathing quietly, she was as far from me as if we'd never met. I wanted to cry. But the ache was too deep to be relieved by tears.”
― André Brink, A Dry White Season

“Shots. Shouts. Dogs.”
― André Brink, A Dry White Season