For who can stop the heart from breaking?
ALAN PATONFor who can stop the heart from breaking?
ALAN PATONThere are voices crying what must be done, a hundred, a thousand voices.
ALAN PATONThis is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country.
ALAN PATONNothing is ever quiet, except for fools.
ALAN PATONCry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved.
ALAN PATONBehind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools
ALAN PATONIt is not “forgive and forget” as if nothing wrong had ever happened, but “forgive and go forward,
ALAN PATONIf you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn’t concern the central issues, it wouldn’t be worth publishing.
ALAN PATONAnd were your back as broad as heaven, and your purse full of gold, and did your compassion reach from here to hell itself, there is nothing you can do.
ALAN PATONShe taught me to seek sustenance from the endeavor itself, but to leave the result to God.
ALAN PATONBut I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering.
ALAN PATONTherefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.
ALAN PATONWhat broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?
ALAN PATONFor it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.
ALAN PATONWhen a deep injury is done us, we never recover until we forgive.
ALAN PATONBut perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school.
ALAN PATON