- Nelson Mandela has died after a long life - long yet lamentably truncated in that he spent twenty-seven of the best years of his manhood incarcerated at the pleasure of the state. He was, and by the time of his death universally held to be, a great man. He well may be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the historical shadows.
- We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable
- I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats
- Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
- Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light
- Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange
- English is not a fit language for the truth of South Africa.
- The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
- "I look after the dogs and I work in the garden. Yes...I am the gardener and the dog-man." He reflects for a moment. "The dog-man," he repeats, savouring the phrase.
- Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
- 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.
- You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat's back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help.
- No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths
- Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
- The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty
- The jackal rips out the hare's bowels, but the world rolls on
- Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
- For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology.
- Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?
- All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world.
- He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable
- Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.
- What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out.
- Fate deals you a hand, and you play the hand you are dealt. You do not whine, you do not complain. That, he used to believe, was his philosophy. Why then can he not resist these plunges into darkness?
- Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere
- All that I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to the grave by old friends.
- How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?
- Do you think what happened here was an exam: if you come through, you get a diploma and safe conduct into the future, or a sign to paint on the door-lintel that will make the plague pass you by?
- He believed that our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish,within or even against the constraints posed by the real world...
- I promise to never be more than the man standing before you.
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