J. M. Coetzee

You know, he said, you've got to work on things. … Like stepping into Desirea's the way you did. Like always looking so unsure. You've got to be cooler about things, and not put everything out on your face all the time. You've got to carry yourself better and think about your look. Doesn't matter how poor you are.

The boy is special, Aunt Annie told his mother, and his mother in turn told him. But what kind of special? No one ever says.

But truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love.

Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?

I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.

A few days ago I heard a performance of the Sibelius fifth symphony. As the closing bars approached, I experienced exactly the large, swelling emotion that the music was written to elicit. What would it have been like, I wondered, to be a Finn in the audience at the first performance of the symphony in Helsinki nearly a century ago, and feel that swell overtake one? The answer: one would have felt proud, proud that one of us could put together such sounds, proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff. Contrast with that one´s feelings of shame that we, our people, have made Guantanamo. Musical creation on the one hand, a machine for inflicting pain and humiliation on the other: the best and the worst that human beings are capable of.

I'm sorry, my child, I just find it hard to whip up an interest in the subject. It's admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.

There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

The activity of writing, then, is not to be distinguished from the activity of self-exploration. It consists in contemplating the sea of internal images, discerning connections, and setting these out in grammatical sentences (“I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences,” says Murnane, whose views on grammar are firm, even pedantic.)

... but what do slow and fast matter any more?

Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.

[Being peppered with invitations to travel far and wide to give lectures] has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.

She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

لا أستطيع أن أعبر لك عن مدى إرهاقى.
ليس إرهاقاً يمكن علاجه بالنوم ليلة هادئة فى سرير حقيقى، الإرهاق الذى أقصده صار جزءاً منى.يشبه الصبغة التى تتسرب إلى كل ما أفعله، وكل ما أقوله، أشعر، بتعبير هوميروس، أننى مرخية الأوتار، لم تعد هناك قوة شد.
ارتخى وتر القوس الذى اعتاد أن يكون مشدوداً، صار مثل جديلة من القطن، وهذا ليس حال الجسد فقط. العقل أيضاً : مرتخ، مستعد لنوم هادئ.