Famous Quotes by Breyten Breytenbach

“Even ivory towers need central heating.”

In reality, all men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create their idea of the perfect man.

The world in which we exist is like a big unkempt garden where weeds spring up here and there, sometimes choking what we have planted with so much care.

Only the sensitive and the delicate walk the edge of reality.

Poetry is the ultimate democracy.

Peace, freedom, and justice cannot come through compromise but only through change.

You cannot trust human beings for anything better than the way they act or react.

We live in a broken world. And that’s not all bad.

True imagination is not fantasy. True imagination is to be able to stand on the edge and stare into the abyss, to be able to hold one’s gaze without flinching, without getting vertigo.

To love is to open oneself to an enduring terror.

An artist is an exile in his own country.

We are our own places of exile.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

There is a nostalgia for disarray, a belief that if only chaos could return, we would be free again.

What we call truth is always only a version, an angle of vision.

Our journey is not to find the center. It is to go back to the beginning.

Writing is another form of exile. You leave behind reality.

Every breath is a testament to the resilience of life.

To be human is to be in doubt perpetually. To go forward is to be in constant curiosity.

The artist is constantly creating; otherwise he is nothing.

There are many ways to be in prison. We are all both jailer and prisoner, each of us within our own mind.