J. M. Coetzee

Perhaps, [Michael] thought, it was better when one did not have to rely on other people

All is allegory... Each creature is key to all other creatures.

So when you climbed, he said, you had to go careful. You had to watch your older brother and follow close his moves. You had to think back on every step before you took it. Remembering hard the whole way up. ... "And if you can’t memory right," he said, "you lose."

If Providence were to watch over all of us,” said Cruso, “who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometimes wake and sometimes sleep, as lower creatures do.”

Truly, man was not made to live alone!

There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas

He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help.

Talking to Petrus is like punching a bag of sand. 'Are you giving him up?' 'Yes, I am giving him up.'

They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die

Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.

Michael K sat ... watching his mother polish other people's floors, learning to be quiet.

If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like.

"He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).

When all else fails, philosophize.

Hatred . . . When it comes to men and sex, David, nothing surprises me any more. Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strange - when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her - isn't it a killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood - doesn't it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?