J. M. Coetzee

“I am a child,” she tells him, “Despite my years, I am an old child, a sinister old child full of stale juices. Someone should make a woman of me… , someone should make a hole in me to let the old juices run out.”

unused body now dusty, dry, unsavoury

Crushed under his soles whole clusters of the thorns that had pierced my skin.

Not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway by heart.

Day by day the wind picks at the roof and the weeds creep across the terraces.

My thoughts ran to Friday… Had I not been there to restrain him, would he in his hunger have eaten the babe? I told myself I did him wrong to think of him as a cannibal or worse, a devourer of the dead. But Cruso had planted the seed in my mind, and now I could not look on Friday’s lips without calling to mind what mean must once have passed them.

But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate.

To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes…

The less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like tombs.

How can I accept that disaster has overtaken my life when the world continues to move so tranquilly through its cycles?

Truly, man was not made to live alone!

It is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation.