A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.

— Damon Galgut

All of them would understand, as he did now, that he had crossed a line in himself, he had left their world behind, the decent world of tea parties and suburban witticisms.

— Damon Galgut

A silence followed, while the two men contemplated dying for love.

— Damon Galgut

Goldie was a believer in the imperial project, which is to say, in the civilizing power of social progress.

— Damon Galgut

He feared at certain moments that the only new knowledge he would take away from this country was learning how to swim and use the telephone.

— Damon Galgut

I am happy to see you, Mass

— Damon Galgut

If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.

— Damon Galgut

It is always an attractive moment when curiosity takes hold.

— Damon Galgut

Memory is fiction. . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Admitted, Claire. “Damon Gal gut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]

— Damon Galgut

No emotion was supposed to cross the great divide of class. Affection could erase all hierarchy; in this was the danger, and the delight.

— Damon Galgut