Alexandra Fuller Quotes

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.

This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it.

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.

I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her.

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.

I listen mostly to classical music.

In general, I almost always watch foreign films.

In ways I don't entirely have the words for an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.

I had the constitution of a missionary.

I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.

I think there's a big difference between loving someone out of duty and dependency and loving someone because you really are able to sort of grow and be whole in the context of that relationship.

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

I adore my family. I don't love their politics. I think they're wonderful parents. They were dreadful at parenting.

In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy.

But this is africa, so hardly anything is normal.