I *heart* Bessie Head

from When Rain Clouds Gather

It was the face of a tortured man, slowly being devoured by the intensity of his inner life, and the tormented hell of that inner life had scarred deep ridges across his brow and down his cheeks, and the icy peaks of loneliness on which the man lived had only experienced the storms and winters of life, never the warm dissolving sun of love. Being himself a lonely man, Makhaya instinctively sensed this. But they differed. Makhaya’s was a self-protective loneliness, and he had the sun inside him all the time.