J. M. Coetzee

The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.

From the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?

He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

The secret and sacred word that binds him to the farm is 'belong'. Out in the veld by himself he can breathe the word aloud: I belong on the farm. What he really believes but does not utter, what he keeps to himself for fear that the spell will end, is a different form of the word: I belong to the farm. He tells no one because the word is misunderstood so easily, turned so easily to its inverse: The farm belongs to me. The farm will never belong to him, he will never be more than a visitor: he accepts that.

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

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

It is the mother and children who make up the core and the husband only a contributor to the economy as a paying lodger might be.

Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He saw me — saw me as I was at that moment — took fright, hurriedly strapped the armour back over his heart, this time with chains and a double padlock, and stole out into the darkness.

The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.

The stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of).

as to who among us is a ghost and who not I have nothing to say: it is a question we can only stare at in silence, like a bird before a snake, hoping it will not swallow us.

You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”

“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

كان من الأفضل أن أكون بصلة تنمو تحت الأرض

But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place: a great rocky hill with a flat top, rising sharply from the sea on all sides except one, dotted with drab bushes that never flowered and never shed their leaves.