Nadine Gordimer

We get to know one another, moment by moment, word by word, smell by smell; we try to understand the pain of each other, the strange religious emotions lying just beneath the surface, the despairs hidden deep in the bowels of silence.

The past and the future: both mastered by the crumpled, heavily discounted, unframed print of the present.

What exactly had those people synthesized, what bridges had they crossed? They were cocooned, like the double-headed camel-fly larva—merged at the mouth and the posterior—darting for cover, leaving behind an excreted sheath, a trail of slime.

Help, for refugees like us was tantamount to numbers unspoken, a dagger-like silence heard only in the lightless depths of the night.

There was something obssessive about love. It was innate, like a child's obsession with rhythm—like the African's need for myth.

They had time to look at one another, to count the perpetual losses and to see reflected in the other's eyes the terror of the unshifting hour, the moments spinning slowly out of control.

Now he saw his family as a group of grim-faced priests engaged in rituals whose purpose was known only to themselves.

Panic was like the special portion of a bitter meal, the bit that left you with a metallic taste in the mouth. It was useless savagery, triggered by the small clique of neurons which obsessively collared you, forcing you to remember your fate.

What did he know of blacks? What did she know of whites? Were not such creatures of understanding simply useful in the daylight when one could observe their shortcomings without too much blood on the carpet?

Night threw human beings apart; day brought them together again.

Fear was like a bloodlt clot, a blocking inhibition preventing normal circulation.

Escape was a measure of their powerlessness. There was nowhere to which they could run, even were their legs to sprout feathers and wings to carry them away like Ibises in search of a lost Nile.