Best 14 quotes of Damon Galgut on MyQuotes

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.

In his clearest moments he thinks he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

The only way you can be universal is to be sure you are very specifically local.

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.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

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.

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

I am happy to see you, Masood.” “Happy? Happy? What a pale, pathetic English word. You must not be ‘happy’ to see me. No, you must be enraptured, transported! You must be overjoyed. I have no use for ‘happy’.

It is always an attractive moment when curiosity takes hold.

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.]

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

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

There are many monsters, oh, many!