Damon Galgut Quotes

He feared at certain moments that the only new knowledge he would take away from this country was learning how to swim and use the telephone.

~ Damon Galgut

All of them would understand, as he did now, that he had crossed a line in himself, he had left their world behind, the decent world of tea parties and suburban witticisms.

~ Damon Galgut

There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.

~ Damon Galgut

Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]

~ Damon Galgut

Race and class were a kind of destiny, very little could dent them. Morgan himself had been decanted back into the vessel that had made him.

~ Damon Galgut

That echo. It played in his head at unexpected moments, repeating certain sounds and making nonsense of them. But could you remember an echo? Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself.

~ Damon Galgut

What he sensed more than anything else was kindness – a kindness of a human and immediate sort. It was surprising how very radical this simple emotion could be.

~ Damon Galgut

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.

~ Damon Galgut

The Indians were inside their bodies, he decided, in a way that the British were not. His own flesh impeded his spirit.

~ Damon Galgut

If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.

~ Damon Galgut

Fire and water and smoke and incense and chanting and bells and butter and blood: this was a language whose syllables were translated into physical terms, a language of the elements. It was a language that he hoped might speak to him one day.

~ Damon Galgut

I am happy to see you, Maso

~ Damon Galgut

Goldie was a believer in the imperial project, which is to say, in the civilising power of social progress.

~ Damon Galgut

No emotion was supposed to cross the great divide of class. Affection could erase all hierarchy; in this was the danger, and the delight.

~ Damon Galgut

It is always an attractive moment when curiosity takes hold.

~ Damon Galgut

A silence followed, while the two men contemplated dying for love.

~ Damon Galgut

What I don’t understand about your type is that you want to emulate the other side. You kick up such a commotion about being different, and all you want is to be the same.

~ Damon Galgut

Of what earthly use were novels? How did they help anybody?

~ Damon Galgut

Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.

~ Damon Galgut