Bryce Courtenay Quotes

“All I know about the Bible is that wherever it goes there’s trouble. The only time I ever heard of it being useful was when a stretcher bearer I was with at the battle of Dundee told me that he’d once gotten hit by a Mauser bullet in the heart, only he was carrying a Bible in his tunic pocket and the Bible saved his life.”

“Better still to concentrate on love, there is already too much hate in this land of ours. This country has been starved of love too long.”

“Your music was beautiful, man, the most beautiful I have ever heard, and such singing we will never hear again.”

“To be smart is not a sin. But to be smart and not use it, that, Peekay, is a sin.”

“That was the magic of the cactus garden. Door succulents can play dumb, a common blue chalkstick can turn from a Cinderella into a princess in front of your very eyes.”

The next week I read the New Testament like mad. There had to be something in there to help me. Pastor Mulvery was always taking bits and pieces of disconnected scripture and putting them together to mean just about anything; surely I could do the same.

“Geel Piet, who had no tribe, whose blood was the mixture of all the people of Southern Africa—the white tribe, the Bushman, the Hottentot, the Cape Malay, and the black tribal blood of Africa itself—was celebrated in death by all the tribes. He was the new man of Southern Africa, the result of the hundred years of torture, treachery, racism, and slaughter in the name of one color or another.”

“A man must go to prison in his best clothes.”

“Always you should go to the source, to the face of the rock, to the beginning. The more you know, the more you can control your destiny.”

“First with the head and then with the heart.”

“At twelve I had already known how to think for at least four years. In teaching me independence of thought, they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child besides love, and they had given me that also.”

“To love music is everything. First I will teach you to love music, after this slowly we shall learn to play.”

“The myth of the Tadpole Angel was complete. Now it could only grow and shape as legends are wont to do. Nothing I would ever do could change things. I had crossed the line to where only the greatest of the medicine men have ever been, perhaps even further, for not even the greatest were known by all the tribes and honored by all of the people. I had become a legend.”

“I wasn’t allowed to do anything except the Lord’s work on a Sunday, but as I wasn’t a born again Christian, any of the Lord’s work I might do, like reading the Shangaan bible to Dee and Sun, wasn’t creating any bricks for my mansion in the sky.”

“Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.”

“Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been.”

“‘Experts, what did I tell you about experts, Peekay?’ ‘You can’t always go by expert opinion. A chicken, if you ask a chicken, should be stuffed with grasshoppers, mieles, and worms.‘”

“Nature is a chain reaction. One thing follows the other, everything is dependent on something else. The smallest is as important as the largest.”

“You are absoloodle the best. For this I give you eleven out of ten.”

“I asked Doc about German poets, and he replied that Goethe was the only one in his opinion who could be considered worthy, but he personally found him a terrible bore and that the Germans put all their poetry to music. He declared I should study the English for their poetry and the Germans for their music.”

“Only man wants always God should be there to condemn this one and save that one. Always it is man who wants to make heaven and hell. Good is too busy training the bees to make honey and every morning opening up all the new flowers for business.”