Top 120 Bryce Courtenay Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a racial memory in man that instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.”

— Bryce Courtenay

52. “Generosity overpowers greed.”

— Bryce Courtenay

53. “It seemed certain now that small could defeat big. All it took was brains and skills and heart and a perfect plan.”

— Bryce Courtenay

54. “I watch people get older and lose their intellectual acuity; you lose that sharpness, that cleanness, that brain that you worked so hard on and that you were gifted with and lose the gifts that were given.”

— Bryce Courtenay

55. “I’m going to die with my mind intact. And to me that is the most exciting way you could possibly die.”

— Bryce Courtenay

56. “As a small child I had discovered that only two places are available to those who wish to remain concealed. The choices are to be a nonentity or an exception. You either disappear into a plebeian background or move forward to where most others fear to follow.”

— Bryce Courtenay

57. “Luck is a curious companion, it comes to those who believe they hold it, and is an elusive servant to those who doubt they possess it.”

— Bryce Courtenay

58. “Cleverness is a false presumption’, Doc had explained, ’it is like being a natural skater, you are so busy doing tricks to impress that you do not see where the thin ice is and before you know, poof! You are in deep, ice-cold water frozen like a dead herring. Intelligence is a harder gift, for this you must work, you must practise it, challenge it and maybe towards the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow whereas intelligence is the substance.”

— Bryce Courtenay

59. “I had learned the most important rule in winning-keep thinking.”

— Bryce Courtenay

60. “He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers”.”

— Bryce Courtenay

61. “My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.”

— Bryce Courtenay

62. “The rich become rich by taking, and the poor by giving.”

— Bryce Courtenay

63. “The reader is always right.”

— Bryce Courtenay

64. “While being beaten by the other kids encouraged me to learn a new language, it wasn’t doing my confidence a lot of good.”

— Bryce Courtenay

65. “By bedtime Nanny was at my side as usual, arriving with a large sweet potato, its tummy open with a spoon sticking out of the middle, tiny wisps of steam curling upwards and condensing on the handle. There is something about a sweet potato that cheers you up when you are low and it celebrates with you when you are happy. Sweet potatoes baked in their jackets have a very large comfort factor built into them.”

— Bryce Courtenay

66. “More fights are lost by underestimating your opponent than by any other way.”

— Bryce Courtenay

67. “Life has a habit of going on.”

— Bryce Courtenay

68. “Morrie, as usual, had made his point: good conversational debate is an end to itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human. p385.”

— Bryce Courtenay

69. “Humans best survive when they are given a purpose; a common enemy to defeat, revenge to wreak or a dream to cling to.”

— Bryce Courtenay

70. “I learned that the greatest camouflage of all is consistency. If you do something often enough and at the same time in the same way, you become invisible.”

— Bryce Courtenay

71. “All children are flotsam driven by the ebb and flow of adult lives.”

— Bryce Courtenay

72. “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.”

— Bryce Courtenay

73. “As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.”

— Bryce Courtenay

74. “When man is brutalized in such a place like this, he is looking for small signs. The smallest sign that someone is worried for him is like a fire on the dark mountain. When a man knows somebody cares, he keeps some small place, a corner maybe of his soul, clean and lit.”

— Bryce Courtenay

75. “The more you know, the more you can control your destiny.”

— Bryce Courtenay

76. “As he had done in his swot spot in boxing, Hymie made us think and behave like winners. ‘Winners make their own luck but winners are also lucky,’ he said.”

— Bryce Courtenay

77. “Racism is a primary force of evil designed to destroy good men.”

— Bryce Courtenay

78. “Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!”

— Bryce Courtenay

79. “My camouflage, begun so many years before under the persecution of the Judge, was now threatening to become the complete man. It was time to slough the mottled and cunningly contrived outer skin to emerge as myself, to face the risk of exposure, to regain the power of one. I had reached the point where to find myself was essential.”

— Bryce Courtenay

80. “I wasn’t much for symbols, my life had somehow contrived to be a mixture of people so that social status meant very little to me.”

— Bryce Courtenay

81. “Everything has happened before; if you know what comes before, then you know what happens now.”

— Bryce Courtenay

82. “No offence, Peekay, but next time first the facts and then the trust.”

— Bryce Courtenay

83. “Hymie would contend that anything, no matter how banal, could be raised to the level of intelligent debate if the minds which attended to it were good enough.”

— Bryce Courtenay

84. “He looked at me and continued, ‘The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking; most people you encounter will be vines, when you are a young plant they are very dangerous.”

— Bryce Courtenay

85. “Jessie, he likes you. You and me are all he has. It’s sometimes nice to know there’s someone who has the time to sit with someone else.”

— Bryce Courtenay

86. “What evidence do you have that the black people in your country are ready to rise against the regime? A true revolution begins from the soil, from the grass roots. It is the final cry of despair from the ground up. Have you heard the cry “freedom”?”

— Bryce Courtenay

87. “This has made him greater than the creatures around him. Everything has happened before, if you know what comes before then you know what happens now.”

— Bryce Courtenay

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

— Bryce Courtenay

89. “It was the first time I’d seen Hymie confused. He’d come up against something that couldn’t be resolved with money or influence.”

— Bryce Courtenay

90. “Nothing would ever remove the wide band of scar tissue which would form to make up the flag and the initials which cancelled the swastika.”

— Bryce Courtenay

91. “Persecution is the major reason for a Jew to exist. If it didn’t happen we’d soon be as intellectually inferior as you lot,’ he’d say. I.”

— Bryce Courtenay

92. “Quite often there is a regular conniption going on. It takes years to make a good translation of this secondary soundtrack and as a small child I could only define it as friendly or otherwise. For camouflage reasons this is often sufficient.”

— Bryce Courtenay

93. “I had been torn between the two, never clearly deciding who I was, changing my camouflage to suit.”

— Bryce Courtenay

94. “The Oxwagon Guard was very similar to the Ku Klux Klan only it included the English in with Jews and Kaffirs as the corrupters of pure Afrikanerdom. The war had helped them to grow into a powerful secret society which would one day become the covert ruler of South Africa and the major influence in declaring it a republic. I heard all this from Snotnose whose father was a member.”

— Bryce Courtenay

95. “I had even taught myself never to consider the consequences of losing a fight. Too much cross-referencing of consequence robs the will of its single-minded concentration to win.”

— Bryce Courtenay

96. “The voice music is not the keening of despair but the expression of a certainty that Africa will live and the spirit will survive brutality. The music of Africa is in the soul and its instruments are in the voices of its people.”

— Bryce Courtenay

97. “Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of an enigma. As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.”

— Bryce Courtenay

98. “As is so often the case with a legend, every incident has two possible interpretations, the plausible and the one which is moulded to suit the making of the myth. Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of an enigma.”

— Bryce Courtenay

99. “Then I will learn to hate also,’ I said with conviction. Big Hettie rocked with laughter. ‘Plenty of time for that, Peekay. 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.”

— Bryce Courtenay

100. “He knew that rescue was a long process made dangerous by hastily contrived directions and the terrible infection of fear.”

— Bryce Courtenay