# Quote — J. M. Coetzee, Youth

> Yet whole days pass in a fog of grey exhaustion. He curses himself for letting himself be sucked back into an affair that costs him so much. If this is what having a mistress entails, how do Picasso and the others get by? He simply has not the energy to run from lecture to lecture, job to job, then when the day is done to pay attention to a woman who veers between euphoria and spells of the blackest gloom in which she thrashes around brooding on a lifetime's grudges.

- 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/yet-whole-days

## 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)