1
Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.J.M. Coetzee
2
What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?J.M. Coetzee
3
You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something – and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little – not a thing in the world – not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.Joseph Conrad
4
O youth! The strenght of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! (...) I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret - as you would think of some one dead you have loved. I shall never forget her.... Pass the bottle.Joseph Conrad
5
This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak–the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.Joseph Conrad