But this is Africa, so hardly anything is normal.

— Alexandra Fuller

I adore my family. I don't love their politics. Furthermore, I think they're wonderful parents. They were dreadful at parenting.

— Alexandra Fuller

I don't know if it's just my age or the climate or the high altitude or some of those old-cowboy values rubbing off on me, but I've grown slightly mellower living in Wyoming. I think if you ride into the West on a high horse, you pretty soon end up in a pile of manure.

— Alexandra Fuller

I have heard over and over again that the drilling business is a dangerous business, and death is an expected part of the game, but I've also heard of the way that safety violations, human and environmental laws, and a concern for the local culture are flaunted in pursuit of money.

— Alexandra Fuller

In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy.

— Alexandra Fuller

I think there's a big difference between loving someone out of duty and dependency and loving someone because you really are able to sort of grow and be whole in the context of that relationship.

— Alexandra Fuller

It is the deep-black-sky quiet time of night, which is the halfway time between the sun setting and the sun rising when even the night animals are quiet—as if they, like day animals, take a break in the middle of their work to rest.

— Alexandra Fuller

It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it. How you see a country depends on whether you can leave it, if you have to.

— Alexandra Fuller

It was the time of night that precedes dawn and is without perspective or reason. It was the hour when regret and fear overwhelm hope and courage and when all that is ugly in us is magnified and when we are most panic-stricken by what we have lost, and what we have almost lost, and what we fear we might lose.

— Alexandra Fuller

She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night.

— Alexandra Fuller