‘That’s very philosophical’
‘Yes. When all else fails, philosophize.’ (60)

Evening falls. they are not hungry, but they eat. Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier. (111)

All at once he has become a recluse, a country recluse. the end of roving. Though the heart be still as loving and the moon be still as bright. Who would have thought it would come to an end so soon and so suddenly: the roving, the loving! (120)

He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. [...] he avoids saying to her, ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ in order not to have to hear her say in return, ’someone has to do it.’ (143)

He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it. This is what he is becoming: stupid, daft, wrongheaded. (146)

She rests her head on her arms; her shoulders heave as she gives in. Again the feeling washed over him: listlessness, indifference, but also weightlessness, as if he has been eaten away from inside and only the eroded shell of his heart remains. How, he thinks to himself, can a man in this state find words, find music that will bring back the dead? (156)

-Coetzee

Calmly he explains it all in the only way he knows how, like a science teacher, that it’s like intertia. That the unbearable processes and procedures of life will only stay exactly the same unless something is done about it.

He then looks up, blink, blink, blinks several times and stares directly into her eyes with a child-like innocence. She looks for the trace of a tear that could almost be there and it’s the most painful thing ever felt. Sincerity.

Three in the morning and no rest has come, six in the morning and she’s come undone.

If you look hard enough, in everything, everything kind of ties into the other, and another.

Try!

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To understand. To never look away. and never, never to forget.”

-Arundhati Roy