“Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.”

A desert is a place without expectation.

I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.

Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

About the joys and the courage, I really don’t know what other people think. I just know that I’ve never left Africa. I’ve lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.

That is the ego which rises and sinks periodically. But you exist always. That which lies beyond the ego is consciousness – the Self.

Consciousness is indeed always with us. Everyone knows ‘I am!’ No one can deny his own being.

See who is the subject; and this inquiry leads you to pure Consciousness beyond the subject.

Call it by any name, God, Self, the Heart, or the Seat of Consciousness, it is all the same.

The normal self is the mind. The mind is with limitations. But pure Consciousness is beyond limitations, and is reached by investigation into the “I.”

Pure Consciousness, which is the Heart, includes all, and nothing is outside or apart from it. That is the ultimate Truth.

The degree of consciousness corresponds to the degree of density or the speed of vibrations. The denser the matter, the less conscious it is.

See who is the doubter, who is the thinker. It is the ego. Hold it; the other thoughts will die away – the ego will be left pure. See the source from where the ego arises and abide in it. That is pure consciousness.