J. M. Coetzee

Will we live to regret this blood spent so lavishly on the sand?

Truly the world should belong to singers and dancers.

I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves.

But more often in the very act of caressing her I am overcome with sleep as if polelaxed, fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body, and wake an hour or two later dizzy, confused, thirsty. These dreamless spells are like death to me, or enchantment, black, outside time.

It would cost little to march them out into the desert . . . to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions.”