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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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)."

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

"There seemed nothing to do but live."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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?"

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