Top 40 Alexandra Fuller Quotes

There are real consequences when women speak out. It’s really dangerous, and it takes real courage. We are still speaking out against a white male majority. Forget the glass ceiling. We haven’t even broken the glass floor!

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.

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

It seems very clear to me that we, in the West, cannot afford to continue assuming propriety over the world’s resources in a careless, greedy way without paying for it – not only with the lives of our loved ones, but also with our souls.

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

I write and I read, and I write and read my way into and out of ideas and life. And that’s what we do. That’s what storytellers do.

I’m unconventional and eccentric and talk things out, and it seemed that the person I married – maybe in reaction – got quieter and more conventional over time. It felt as if we were putting each other in a straitjacket.

I want to make words out of life. That’s bigger than me. That’s as big a creative force as – bigger than, for me, even having children. That felt more accidental – wonderful, but accidental.

I’m a working writer; this is my job. So it matters to me that it’s good. I sweat over every word. I don’t just vomit this stuff up. It’s agony. The only thing that comes close is childbirth, except it’s like being in labor for eighteen months.

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

I remember Karoi as a very hot, flat place, but in reality, it is all hills. We just lived next to an airstrip – the only flat piece of land around. That was my world as a three-year-old and sums up the indelible power of memory to a young child.

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.

For a memoir to really succeed, the author has to do such hard work before they come to the page. They have to do a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.

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.

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

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.

There is a myth that writers get to choose their stories. You don’t get to choose your story any more than you get to choose your children. You can make the decision to write, but beyond that, at the end of the day, it’s going to come out how it’s going to come out.

It is the perpetual tragedy of all families: each of us believe our congenital pathologies and singular pains end with us.

In general, I almost always watch foreign films.

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 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.

The most basic human impulse is toward entropy and laziness. The less we have to do to grow spiritually, the more likely we are to do it.

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.

You can have an intense connection to someone without being a good, lifelong mate for him. Love is complicated and difficult that way.

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.

I think for writers, I think it’s really important to court eviction from your tribe: to expose things and to wake people up. And so I think that that can feel like a violation to the people you love the most.

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.

I have heard over and over again that the drilling business is a dangerous business, and death is an expected part of the game, but I’ve also heard of the way that safety violations, human and environmental laws, and a concern for the local culture are flaunted in pursuit of money.

Yes, as an oppressed people, American Indians have this epic burden, but first and foremost, they’re human: sometimes a mess, sometimes funny or sad, at times very wise, and other times not wise at all – a lot like me.

I grew up in southern Africa but was born in England, so my family was afflicted with the stiff upper lip of the British. When coupled with the violence we saw as children, that can be a fatal combination. Fortunately, I have an outlet for trauma in my writing.

I think that being raised the way I was, where everything was so uncompromising, where, you know, we’re prepared to fight to the death for the soil that you believed belonged to you – that kind of extreme engagement is very difficult to flush out of your system – or your belief system, anyway.

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

There is no way to order chaos. It’s the fundamental theory at the beginning and end of everything; it’s the ultimate law of nature. There’s no way to win against unpredictability, to suit up completely against accidents.

I listen mostly to classical music.

I did try to write fiction. I wrote 10 novels. And they were all just awful.

Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another. We ask movie directors why they chose to use certain lights and angles and speeds of film, but most of the time, we ignore the craft of a writer.

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.

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

Oh, I don’t keep a journal. How you remember an incident is dictated by your emotional state at the time. How you receive the information that is coming in is definitely based on your history and who you are.