# Quote — J. M. Coetzee, Youth

> At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode — he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which — catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended. — Chapter 11, page 93.

- Author: [J. M. Coetzee](https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-m-coetzee.md)
- Book: [Youth](https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-m-coetzee/youth.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._M._Coetzee#Youth:_Scenes_from_Provincial_Life_II_(2002)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-m-coetzee/youth/at-the-everyman

## More from this book

> How can anyone in England understand what brings people from the far corners of the earth to die on a wet, miserable island which they detest and to which they have no ties? — Chapter 18, page 148.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-m-coetzee/youth/how-can-anyone.md)

> He does not as yet know England well enough to do England in prose. He is not even sure he can do the parts of London he is familiar with, the London of crowds trudging to work, of cold and rain, of bedsitters with curtainless windows and forty-watt bulbs. — Chapter 7, page 63.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-m-coetzee/youth/he-does-not.md)

> Once upon a time, when he was still an innocent child, he believed that cleverness was the only yardstick that mattered, that as long as he was clever enough he would attain everything he desired. Going to university put him in his place. The university showed him he was not the cleverest, not by a long chalk. — Chapter 8, page 65.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/j-m-coetzee/youth/once-upon-a-time.md)