“Sometimes we only manage to arrive before we have to move on again.”

“You see, only defeat forces things to change.When losing, we feel reborn and we find the guts to live again by performing the same mistakes under new forms.On the contrary, victory humiliates human sentiment and hopelessly sends people to celebrate along with wine and prostitutes.”

“Only sometimes when we pick and choose among the rules we discover later that we have set aside something precious in the process.”

“I know something of shame [...] How can we not all feel it? We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors. [...] I think we wake up every day with high intentions and by dusk we have routinely fallen short. Sometimes I think God created the darkness just so he didn't have to look at us all the time.”

“I wonder what becomes of lost opportunities? Perhaps our guardian angel gathers them up as we drop them, and will give them back to us in the beautiful sometime when we have grown wiser, and learned how to use them rightly.”

“It occurred to me that if Africa needed us, sometimes we needed Africa a great deal more.”

“I'm beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead.”