I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread… - J. M. Coetzee

...we are all sorry when we are discovered. Then we are very sorry.It's not the question if we're sorry. The question is did we draw a lesson? The question is: what are we going to do now, when we're sorry?

Sometimes when he is among the sheep — when they have been rounded up to be dipped, and are penned tight and cannot get away — he wants to whisper to them, warn them of what lies in store. But then in their yellow eyes he catches a glimpse of something that silences him: a resignation, a foreknowledge not only of what happens to sheep at the hands of Ros behind the shed, but of what awaits them at the end of their long, thirsty ride to Cape Town on the transport lorry. They know it all, down to the finest detail, and yet they submit. They have calculated the price and are prepared to pay it — the price of being on earth, the price of being alive.

His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong