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.
A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be hap...
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.
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.
(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.
Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world... But there are other people to do these things - the an...
Why has he taken this job?... For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more conv...
He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. He tries not to sentimentalize the animals he kills, or to sentimentalize Bev Shaw. 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.
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.
Sigue dedicándose a la enseñanza [...] porque así aprende la virtud de la humildad, porque así comprende con toda claridad cuál es su lugar en el mundo. No se le escapa la ironía, a saber, que el que va a enseñar aprende la lección más profu...
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).
Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. 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 ...
I don't know what you do about sex and I don't want to know, but this is not the way to go about it. You're what – fifty-two? Do you think a young girl finds any pleasure in going to bed with a man of that age? Do you think she finds it good to wat...
Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certai...
The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is alwa...
Not only may you not enter the state without certification: you are, in the eyes of the state, not dead until you are certified dead; and you can be certified dead only by an officer who himself (herself) holds state certification. The state pursues ...
No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use ...
...we can pretend that the book in question is not Mr. West’s but mine, made mine by the madness of my reading.
There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.
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.
It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or el...
