J. M. Coetzee

I am… a farmgirl… not unaware that there is a hole between my legs that has never been filled.

“You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”

I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story.

When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: of being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso.

I do not love him, but he is mine.

I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of a castaway is a castaway at heart

To live in silence is to live like the whales.

It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau.

If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain.

We can bring [the island] to life only by setting it within a larger story.

I will leave behind my terraces and walls," he said. "They will be enough. They will be more than enough.”

It was I who shared Cruso's bed and closed Cruso's eyes.