Die Wahrheit wird nicht im Zorn gesprochen. Die Wahrheit, wenn sie denn gesprochen wird, wird im Geist der Liebe gesprochen.
The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
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.
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.
In a minute, in an hour, it will be too late; whatever is happening to her will be set in stone, will belong to the past. But now is not too late. Now he must do something
A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.
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 own proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world.
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.
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.
Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That’s what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.
(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.
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.
Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.
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.
The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die rather than change its nature.
To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.
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.
Is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing place of memories?
In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.
I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones.
I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the one least fitted to write a memorial. Better the blacksmith with his cries of rage and woe.
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?
There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
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.
Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.
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.
Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.
Moer and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth in South Africa.