For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing. - J. M. Coetzee

If i were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism

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

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.