I attended school regularly for three years. I learned to read and write. ‘Lamb’s Tales’ from Shakespeare was my favourite reading matter. I stole, by finding, Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury.’ These two books, and the ‘Everyman’ edition of John Keats, were my proudest and dearest possessions, my greatest wealth. Peter Abrahams Read Quote
My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. ‘Coloured’ is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white. Peter Abrahams Read Quote
With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books. Peter Abrahams Read Quote
You can’t walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values. Peter Abrahams Read Quote
Many have changed so much that they have lost the magic of the dream that carried them on their own bootstraps. Peter Abrahams Read Quote
Joseph and his mother come from the black kings who were before the white man. Peter Abrahams Read Quote
Tribal man is not an individual in the western sense. Psychologically and emotionally, he is the present living personification of a number of forces, among the most important of which are the ancestral dead. Peter Abrahams Read Quote
Perhaps life had a meaning that transcended race and colour. If it had, I could not find it in South Africa. Peter Abrahams Read Quote
The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings. Peter Abrahams Read Quote
