"Her tongue like a bird fluttering in her mouth: soft feathers, soft wing-beats."
"If we do not forget, they say, the world will soon be nothing but a huge library."
"It is from knowing that he is dead that he wants to protect his son. As long as I live, he thinks, let me be the one who knows! By whatever act of will it takes, let me be the thinking animal plunging through the air."
Thinking animal- I like that.
"In his fingers a needle is a curiosity, an arrow from Lilliput."
"Forever I look back. Forever I am absorbed in your gaze. A field of crystal points, dancing, winking, and I one of them. Stars in the sky, and fires on the plain answering them. Two realms signalling to each other."
"Rather, he feels like a leaf or a seed in the grip of a headlong force, a winged seed drawn up into the highest windstream, carried dizzily above the oceans."
Marvelous. Coetzee connects the process of sex to reaching his dead son.
"Nothing in the pressure of her body answers to him. Disgrace, he thinks: this is how one enters disgrace."
Maybe that is the secret to his other book.
"For that is surely what a woman wants: to be courted, wooed, persuaded, won! Even when she surrenders, she wants to give herself up not frankly but in a delicious haze of confusion, resisting yet unresisting. Falling, but never an irrevocable falling. No: to fall and then come back from the fall new, remade, virginal, ready to be wooed again and to fall again. A playing with death, a play of resurrection."
"'Why are we given old age, brothers? So that we can grow small again, small enough to crawl through the eye of a needle.'"
"A horse does not understand that it has been born into the world to pull carts. It thinks it is here to be beaten. It thinks of a cart as a huge object it is tied to so that it cannot run away while it is being beaten.'"
"Is such a woman marked by abandon, an abandon that does not care where it leads, to pleasure or to pain, that uses the sensual body only as a vehicle, and only because we cannot live disembodied?"
"Not the People's Vengeance but the Vengeance of the Sons: is that what underlies revolution – fathers envying their sons their women, sons scheming to rob their fathers' cashboxes?"
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He writes beautifully. I actually read this while living in St. Petersburg, Russia. He knows the city pretty well- I wonder if he lived here for awhile?
I like that he wrote about Dostoevsky. and from such an interesting angle.
Pub- pdf
"If we do not forget, they say, the world will soon be nothing but a huge library."
"It is from knowing that he is dead that he wants to protect his son. As long as I live, he thinks, let me be the one who knows! By whatever act of will it takes, let me be the thinking animal plunging through the air."
Thinking animal- I like that.
"In his fingers a needle is a curiosity, an arrow from Lilliput."
"Forever I look back. Forever I am absorbed in your gaze. A field of crystal points, dancing, winking, and I one of them. Stars in the sky, and fires on the plain answering them. Two realms signalling to each other."
"Rather, he feels like a leaf or a seed in the grip of a headlong force, a winged seed drawn up into the highest windstream, carried dizzily above the oceans."
Marvelous. Coetzee connects the process of sex to reaching his dead son.
"Nothing in the pressure of her body answers to him. Disgrace, he thinks: this is how one enters disgrace."
Maybe that is the secret to his other book.
"For that is surely what a woman wants: to be courted, wooed, persuaded, won! Even when she surrenders, she wants to give herself up not frankly but in a delicious haze of confusion, resisting yet unresisting. Falling, but never an irrevocable falling. No: to fall and then come back from the fall new, remade, virginal, ready to be wooed again and to fall again. A playing with death, a play of resurrection."
"'Why are we given old age, brothers? So that we can grow small again, small enough to crawl through the eye of a needle.'"
"A horse does not understand that it has been born into the world to pull carts. It thinks it is here to be beaten. It thinks of a cart as a huge object it is tied to so that it cannot run away while it is being beaten.'"
"Is such a woman marked by abandon, an abandon that does not care where it leads, to pleasure or to pain, that uses the sensual body only as a vehicle, and only because we cannot live disembodied?"
"Not the People's Vengeance but the Vengeance of the Sons: is that what underlies revolution – fathers envying their sons their women, sons scheming to rob their fathers' cashboxes?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He writes beautifully. I actually read this while living in St. Petersburg, Russia. He knows the city pretty well- I wonder if he lived here for awhile?
I like that he wrote about Dostoevsky. and from such an interesting angle.
Pub- pdf
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