1
A risk to own anything : a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around. Not enough shoes, cars, cigarettes. Too many people too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day.J.M. Coetzee
2
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.J.M. Coetzee
3
In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before him. A fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue. What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant she is remembering the man who picked her up on the roadside in Africa and spent the night with her? Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness.J.M. Coetzee
4
In a minute, in an hour, it will be too late; whatever is happening to her will be set in stone, will belong to the past. But now is not too late. Now he must do somethingJ.M. Coetzee
5
Assad whistled a few notes of one of his native country's melancholic songs. It sounded as though he was whistling backwardsJussi AdlerOlsen
6
Carl Mørck, am I disturbing you? said a voice at the door, which made his blood boil and turn to ice at the same time. His spinal cord sent five commands through his infrastructure: get rid of the eraser, cover the last line, put away the cigarette, drop the stupid facial expression, close your mouth!Jussi AdlerOlsen
7
He'd make her work so hard that a job as a cardboard-box presser at the margerine factory would seem like paradise.Jussi AdlerOlsen
8
Bak stood a moment, as though considering whether the sum total of their shared working life was ending in a minus or a plus.Jussi AdlerOlsen
9
A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.J.M. Coetzee
10
Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.J.M. Coetzee
11
His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.J.M. Coetzee
12
I don't know what you do about sex and I don't want to know, but this is not the way to go about it. You're what — fifty-two? Do you think a young girl finds any pleasure in going to bed with a man of that age? Do you think she finds it good to watch you in the middle of your..? Do you ever think about that?" He is silent." Don't expect sympathy from me, David, and don't expect sympathy from anyone else either. No sympathy, no mercy, not in this day and age. Everyone's hand will be against you, and why not? Really, how could you?" The old tone has entered, the tone of the last years of their married life: passionate recrimination. Even Rosalind must be aware of that. Yet perhaps she has a point. Perhaps it is the right of the young to be protected from the sight of their elders in the throes of passion. That is what whores are for, after all: to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely.J.M. Coetzee
13
Why has he taken this job?... For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? 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
14
He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. He tries not to sentimentalize the animals he kills, or to sentimentalize Bev Shaw. He avoids saying to her 'I don't know how you do it, ' in order not to have to hear her say in return, 'Someone has to do it.J.M. Coetzee
15
(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.J.M. Coetzee
16
A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them. .J.M. Coetzee
17
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.J.M. Coetzee
18
The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, in this time, it is not. It is my bussines, mine alone.' This place being what?'' This place being South AfricaJ.M. Coetzee
19
Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world.. But there are other people to do these things - the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing, even the Byron thing. He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it. .J.M. Coetzee
20
Moer and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth in South Africa.J.M. Coetzee