Alexandra Fuller

I listen mostly to classical music.

— Alexandra Fuller

“Cowboy up, cupcake.”

— Alexandra Fuller

I had the constitution of a missionary.

— Alexandra Fuller

The belief that we can be done with our past is a myth.

— Alexandra Fuller

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

— Alexandra Fuller

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

— Alexandra Fuller

“How much strength must one people have? And for how long must they have it?”

— Alexandra Fuller

“Toasted tobacco, no additives,' I said. 'Yum. Tastes like childhood.”

— Alexandra Fuller

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

— Alexandra Fuller

In general, I almost always watch foreign films.

— Alexandra Fuller

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

— Alexandra Fuller

I write and I read, and I write and read my way into and out of ideas and life. And that's what…

— Alexandra Fuller

“...but of course any time we become something other than ourselves, it is just death by another name.”

— Alexandra Fuller

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

— Alexandra Fuller

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

— Alexandra Fuller

Being a writer but also having been raised the way I was, I tend to turn to books for answers.

— Alexandra Fuller

“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless,’” Arundhati Roy has said. “There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

— Alexandra Fuller

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

— Alexandra Fuller

I think that being raised the way I was, where everything was so uncompromising, where, you know, we're prepared to fight to…

— Alexandra Fuller

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories…

— Alexandra Fuller

I remember Karoi as a very hot, flat place, but in reality, it is all hills. We just lived next to an…

— Alexandra Fuller

But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself -- maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by…

— Alexandra Fuller

Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another.…

— Alexandra Fuller

It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and…

— Alexandra Fuller

Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me.…

— Alexandra Fuller

Surely until all of us own and honor one another's dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another…

— Alexandra Fuller

I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I…

— Alexandra Fuller

“The flowers for the wedding have been done by a drunken homosexual from the Copperbelt. His flower arrangements, his way of life,…

— Alexandra Fuller

Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped…

— Alexandra Fuller

“Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped…

— Alexandra Fuller

The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all…

— Alexandra Fuller

“It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a…

— Alexandra Fuller

“Things get worse. When Mum is drugged and sad and singing tunes from the Roger Whittaker album every night, that is one…

— Alexandra Fuller

“The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is…

— Alexandra Fuller

In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune…

— Alexandra Fuller

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

— Alexandra Fuller

“Motherhood—the way too many of us do it alone now—without an exaltation of female relatives, without a heft of knowing matrons to…

— Alexandra Fuller

“Well-bred' ensured buckled noses, high-arched feet, a predisposition to madness, and ... an innate belief in our own unquestioning superiority.”

— Alexandra Fuller

This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make…

— Alexandra Fuller

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

— Alexandra Fuller