But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt… - J. M. Coetzee

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But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover — I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her — but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.

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About J. M. Coetzee

John Maxwell Coetzee (born 9 February 1940), often called J. M. Coetzee, is a South African-born writer and academic. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He now lives in Australia.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Native Name: John Maxwell Coetzee
Alternative Names: John Coetzee J.M. Coetzee
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Additional quotes by J. M. Coetzee

I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see.

Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.

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But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies have their own signs. It is the home of Friday.

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