Inspiring Quotes from CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY

I am currently reading Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, and I find it to be full of amazing writing and focusing on an amazing story. The novel's storyline is set in South Africa, and it follows the murder of a man who was working towards confronting the racial and societal issues facing South Africa. The man who was murdered was white, and the man who murdered him was a native. The story is told from various points of view, including essays by the man who was murdered, and this framework of telling the story permits the reader to see the individual struggles of those involved. The book really exposes the struggle and the intense emotion of the family members and of South Africa over this racially-charged death. Additionally, Paton wrote the novel using the diction of South Africans at that time, and so the reader is immediately transported to another land through their colloquial sayings and typical responses.

While reading books, I often mark passages of extremely inspiring writing or passages of such well-crafted phrases that they make my skin tingle. Here are a couple of those passages, and to give context, they are found in an essay written by the murdered man, and the essay discusses the creating of segregation and the blame the white man bore for destroying a way of life:

"Our civilization has therefore an inescapable duty to set up another system of order and tradition and convention."

I love the phrase "an inescapable duty" -- the word "inescapable" really nails down how strong the "duty" is. It is such a call to action, and it so clearly places blame on a party. The "author" of this passage is built to have a large Abraham Lincoln collection, and I can easily see this phrase coming from Lincoln, and in a later time (post-publication date), from Martin Luther King, Jr.

"But we never did it thoroughly or honestly. We set aside one-tenth of the land for four-fifths of the people. Thus we made it inevitable, and some say we did it knowingly, that labour would come to the towns. We are caught in the toils of our selfishness."

In this passage, I love the reference to the criminal mens rea of "knowingly" -- it accurately conveys that there was a thought process behind the destruction of a way of life to accomodate the establishment of a new dominant society and ruling class. Moreover, the phrase "caught in the toils of our selfishness" so precisely defines the life-and-death problems facing the South Africans at that time.