"Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?"

"When all else fails, philosophize."

"The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do."

"(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution."

"A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us."

"His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul."

"We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable."

"Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt."

"Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people."

"Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it."

"I am not the we of anyone"

"You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.” “I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all."

"Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation."

"It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet."

"Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization."

"Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange."

"She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change."

"Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences."

"For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing."

"No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice)."

"He knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone."

"But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?"

"Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths"

"Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response."

"Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity."

"I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am."

"He does not know what freedom is. Freedom is a word, less than a word, a noise, one of the multitude of noises I make when I open my mouth."

"Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined."

"I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best."

"And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant"

"There seemed nothing to do but live."

"I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted."

"His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72)."

"Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict."

"I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them."

"The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard." --Disgrace"

"He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa."

"The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty."

"There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason."

"If only we could eat our sunsets, I say, we would all be full."

"The jackal rips out the hare's bowels, but the world rolls on."

"If i were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism"

"Perhaps it does us good to have a fall every now and then. As long as we don't break."

"Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?"

"Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe."

"...So that someone might want to put you in a book...So that you may be worth putting in a book...Live like a hero...Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?"

"...from the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?"

"The sun's touch is kind."

"To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy."

"Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence."