Quotes from Alexandra Fuller

You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn't. You know how it is. You have to leave before the rains come, or it's too late.

The mind I love must have wild places: a tangled orchard where damsons drop in heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, a chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody has fathomed the depths of... and paths threaeded with flowers planted by the mind." Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulnes

I find luxury only encourages guests to outstay their welcome. A reptile or two keeps everyone on their toes

Until you make the unconscious conscious," Carl Jung said, "it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

But this is africa, so hardly anything is normal.

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.

Well-bred' ensured buckled noses, high-arched feet, a predisposition to madness, and ... an innate belief in our own unquestioning superiority.

People who are careless of the land and of the creatures and spirits with which we share it are careless of themselves.

Make a plan," Dad always said. "And if that doesn't work, make another one and if that doesn't work, you're probably the problem.

In Africa, we filled up all available time busily doing not much, and then we wasted the rest.

Retaining culture takes effort and persistence and discipline. It's a commitment, not a flag. You can't just pull it out and wave it about when it's convenient.

For me, writing is really an agony. I feel as if I have a huge, luminous idea that has the potential to be really profound, and then when I set it down on paper, I find the power of the idea has been hugely weakened in the process of transmission.

It's probably cliche to say this, but in my experience, people are far more alike than they are dissimilar.

That's the advantage of being a writer: No matter what happens, as long as you survive it, it goes into the work.

The only process that comes close to the process of writing a whole book, in my experience, is childbirth. There is this moment when you think you can't possibly labour for another moment, and that, paradoxically, is when you have to push hardest.

Marriage is the trickiest and most basic contract that we have.

I look around and pay attention to what around me is not being talked about, and then I talk about it with as much humour and honesty as I can. All my books have been that way.

I don't know if it's just my age or the climate or the high altitude or some of those old-cowboy values rubbing off on me, but I've grown slightly mellower living in Wyoming. I think if you ride into the West on a high horse, you pretty soon end up in a pile of manure.

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.

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.

She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night.

Bloody dogs," Dad said, kicking indiscriminately under the table. He put his revolver next to his side-plate. Mum put her Uzi on an empty chair beside her. "Safety on?" Dad always asked. "Those things are liable to go off at the touch of a gnat's testicle.

All of us are mad and then she adds,smiling, but I'm the only one with a certificate to prove it

The problem with most people," Dad said once, not necessarily implying that I counted as most people, but not discounting the possibility either, "is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live.