Quotes from JM Coetzee

So what is it, he thought, that binds me to this spot of earth as if to a home I cannot leave? We must all leave home, after all, we must all leave our mothers. Or am I such a child, such a child from such a line of children, that none of us can leave, but have to come back to die here with our heads upon our mothers' laps, I upon hers, she upon her mother's, and so back and back, generation upon generation?

a rival line, on his small beginnings out at the dam. Even his tools should be of wood and leather and gut, materials the insects would eat when one day he no longer needed them.

She shakes him; that is what she presumable does to other readers too. That is, presumably why, in the larger picture, she exists. What a strange reward for a lifetime of shaking people: to be conveyed to this town in Pennsylvania and given money!

It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.

What if...what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it: perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?

Hand in hand they stroke her womb, watching for it to flicker and blossom. p. 3

When all else fail, philosophize.

Because it is not in the nature of love affairs for the lovers to see each other whole and steady.

Even if you choose someone who is not necessarily the love of your life, married life will be better than what you have now, with just your father and yourself. It is not good to sleep alone night after night.

Follow your own nature.

At what age , he wonders, did Origen castrate himself? Not the most graceful solution, but then ageing is not a graceful bussines.

The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.