Top 35 Alexandra Fuller Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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 to get on with it.”

— Alexandra Fuller

2. “Cowboy up, cupcake.”

— Alexandra Fuller

3. “Until you make the unconscious conscious,” Carl Jung said, “it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

— Alexandra Fuller

4. “But deep down I always knew there is no way to order chaos. It’s the fundamental theory at the beginning and end of everything; it’s the ultimate law of nature. There’s no way to win against unpredictability, to suit up completely against accidents.”

— Alexandra Fuller

5. “You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn’t. You know how it is. You have to leave before the rains come, or it’s too late.”

— Alexandra Fuller

6. “There aren’t enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don’t do it for the money or because they want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breathe or eat or love.”

— Alexandra Fuller

7. “I always knew mum loved me – tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn’t always be there.”

— Alexandra Fuller

8. “It’s a long day’s drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins – real and imagined – and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.”

— Alexandra Fuller

9. “How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.”

— Alexandra Fuller

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

— Alexandra Fuller

11. “For the first time, I was beginning to see that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable, unapologetic way, she must first possess it.”

— Alexandra Fuller

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

— Alexandra Fuller

13. “Surely until all of us own and honor one another’s dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace.”

— Alexandra Fuller

14. “The problem with most people,” Dad said once, not necessarily implying that I counted as most people, but not discounting the possibility either, “is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live.”

— Alexandra Fuller

15. “You can’t rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.”

— Alexandra Fuller

16. “But this is africa, so hardly anything is normal.”

— Alexandra Fuller

17. “But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself – maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow.”

— Alexandra Fuller

18. “Because of all the kinds of love there are out there – romantic, passionate, parental, spousal, brotherly – the love that is touted as most unassailable, complicit, and colluding is the love between sisters.”

— Alexandra Fuller

19. “People who are careless of the land and of the creatures and spirits with which we share it are careless of themselves.”

— Alexandra Fuller

20. “I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I’ve never heard of before.”

— Alexandra Fuller

21. “I listen mostly to classical music.”

— Alexandra Fuller

22. “What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin – when we’re dancing with our own skeletons – our words might be all that’s left of us.”

— Alexandra Fuller

23. “At morning assembly we were read the words of Cyprian of Carthage: ‘Let us on both sides of death always pray for one another.’ Then we bowed our heads and beseeched God to protect our troops, and to send us peace and plentiful rain, and to grant us an ample harvest. But God remained pretty meager with his miracles: the dead stayed dead, the war went on, the rain either came too early and too strong or not at all, and the harvest depended in whether or not we’d had eelworm and blight.”

— Alexandra Fuller

24. “Bloody dogs,” Dad said, kicking indiscriminately under the table. He put his revolver next to his side-plate. Mum put her Uzi on an empty chair beside her. “Safety on?” Dad always asked. “Those things are liable to go off at the touch of a gnat’s testicle.”

— Alexandra Fuller

25. “There is a madman who lives on the road to Mkushi. Every full moon he comes out onto the tarmac and digs a deep trench across the road. Dad would like to find the madman and bring him back to the farm. ‘Think what a strong bugger he is, eh?’ ‘Yes, but you could only get him to work when there was a full moon.’ ‘Which is twice as hard as any other Zambian.”

— Alexandra Fuller

26. “It should not be physically possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible.”

— Alexandra Fuller

27. “I had the constitution of a missionary.”

— Alexandra Fuller

28. “In general, I almost always watch foreign films.”

— Alexandra Fuller

29. “Stand unshod upon it for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator,” Alan Paton wrote. “Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.”4.”

— Alexandra Fuller

30. “As soon as we mistake our ease for our security, our conveniences for our human rights, our luxuries for our entitlements, we aren’t culturally distinct anymore. Then we’re part of someone else’s corporate plan, we’re a predictable, fulfilled expectation; we’re a black dot on a bottom line.”

— Alexandra Fuller

31. “In ways I don’t entirely have the words for, an experience, thought or a lesson isn’t real for me until I’ve written down.”

— Alexandra Fuller

32. “There’s a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it’s too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.”

— Alexandra Fuller

33. “Time was the first thing I noticed about the United States.”

— Alexandra Fuller

34. “We drink the barely cool locally brewed Mosi from the leaky mildew-smelling fridge, keeping an eye out for UFOs, unidentified floating objects, in the bottles.”

— Alexandra Fuller

35. “So happy to be home I feel as if I’m swimming in syrup.”

— Alexandra Fuller

36. “She is gently manic, in a pottering sort of way.”

— Alexandra Fuller

37. “Make a plan,” Dad always said. “And if that doesn’t work, make another one and if that doesn’t work, you’re probably the problem.”

— Alexandra Fuller