Life & Times of Michael K Quotes

“He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything, as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' ... he... felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness... like a gush of warm water... All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a tender of the soil.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory--speaking at the highest level--of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Let me tell you the meaning of the sacred and alluring garden that blooms in the heart of the desert and produces the food of life. The garden for which you are currently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps. It is another name for the only place where you belong, Michaels, where you do not feel homeless. It is off every map, no road leads to it that is merely a road, and only you know the way.”
― J M Coetzee, Life And Times Of Michael K

“it came to me with great force that I was wasting my life, that I was wasting it by living from day to day in a state of waiting, that I had in effect given myself up as a prisoner to this war.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“كان من الأفضل أن أكون بصلة تنمو تحت الأرض”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Anyway, said Robert, they got a big fright. After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soap. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn't give a stuff for us. They just don't want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“When my mother was dying in hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“What would yield the greater benefit to mankind: if I spent the afternoon taking stock in my dispensary, or if I went to the beach and took off my clothes and lay in my underpants absorbing the benign spring sun, watching the children frolic in the water, later buying an ice-cream from the kiosk on the parking lot, if the kiosk is still there? What did Noël ultimately achieve labouring at his desk to balance the bodies out against the bodies in? Would he not be better off taking a nap? Maybe the universal sum of happiness would be increased if we declared this afternoon a holiday and went down to the beach, commandant, doctor, chaplain, PT instructors, guards, dog-handlers all together with the six hard cases from the detention block, leaving behind the concussion case to look after things. Perhaps we might meet some girls. For what reason were we waging the war, after all, but to augment the sum of happiness in the universe? Or was I misremembering, was that another war I was thinking of?”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“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.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Also,’ I said, ‘can you remind me why we are fighting this war? I was told once, but that was long ago and I seem to have forgotten.’ ‘We are fighting this war,’ Noël said, ‘so that minorities will have a say in their destinies.’ We exchanged empty looks. Whatever my mood was, I could not get him to share it. ‘Let me have that certificate you promised,’ he said. ‘Don’t fill in the date, leave it blank.’ Then as I sat at the nurse’s table in the evening, with nothing to do and the ward in darkness and the south-easter beginning to stir outside and the concussion case breathing away quietly, it came to me with great force that I was wasting my life, that I was wasting it by living from day to day in a state of waiting, that I had in effect given”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K

“It was no longer a matter of growing a fat crop, only of growing enough for the seed not to die out. There will be another year, he consoled himself, another summer in which to try again.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“but a hospital, it seemed, was a place for bodies, where bodies asserted their rights.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K

“Do I believe in helping people? he wondered. He might help people, he might not help them, he did not know beforehand, anything was possible. He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help. Perhaps I am the stony ground, he thought.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Doch am meisten von allem lernte er, als der Sommer sich neigte, den Müßiggang zu lieben, Müßiggang nicht mehr als Strecken der Freiheit, die heimlich hier und da unfreiwilliger Arbeit abgeknapst wurden, gestohlene Augenblicke der Freude, wenn er mit von den Fingern baumelnder Gabel vor einem Blumenbeet auf der Fersen hockte, nein, Müßiggang als Hingabe seiner selbst an die Zeit, eine Zeit, die langsam wie Öl von Horizont zu Horizont über das Angesicht der Welt floß, die seinen Leib überspülte, in seinen Achselhöhlen und Leisen kreiste, die seine Augenlider bewegte. Er war weder erfreut noch verärgert, wenn es zu arbeiten galt, es war dasselbe.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Trotzdem konnte er sich nicht vorstellen, sein Leben damit zu verbringen, Grenzpfähle in die Erde zu treiben, Zäune zu errichten, das Land aufzuteilen. Er sah sich nicht als etwas Schweres, das Spuren hinterließ, sondern allenfalls als einen winzigen Fleck auf der Oberfläche der Erde, die zu fest schlief, um das Kratzen eines Ameisenfußes, das Raspeln von Schmetterlingszähnen, das Taumeln von Staub zu bemerken.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Η μεγαλύτερη αρετή είναι να μην είσαι φτιαγμένος από σίδερο.”
― J. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Δεν υπάρχει πια κανένας τόπος που να χωράει τις οικουμενικές ψυχές, ίσως μόνο η Ανταρκτική ή η ανοιχτή θάλασσα.”
― J. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Όλοι γνωρίζουμε πόσο δύσκολο είναι να ικανοποιήσεις την πείνα για πίστη σε κάτι με το όραμα του μέλλοντος που θα μας παρέχει ο πόλεμος.”
― J. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Όταν οι άνθρωποι πέθαιναν, άφηναν πτώματα πίσω τους. Ακόμα και οι άνθρωποι που πέθαιναν από πείνα άφηναν πτώματα πίσω τους. Τα πτώματα μπορούσαν να είναι εξίσου δυσάρεστα με τα σώματα των ζωντανών, αν αλήθευε ότι ένα ζωντανό σώμα μπορούσε να είναι δυσάρεστο.”
― J. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Your body rejected the food we fed you and you grew even thinner. Why? I asked myself: why will this man not eat when he is plainly starving? Then as I watched you day after day I slowly began to understand the truth: that you were crying secretly, unknown to your conscious self (forgive the term), for a different kind of food, food that no camp could supply. Your will remained pliant but your body was crying to be fed its own food, and only that. Now I had been taught that the body contains no ambivalence. 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. I stood for hours in the doorway of the ward watching you and puzzling over the mystery. It was not a principle, an idea that lay behind your decline. You did not want to die, but you were dying. You were like a bunny-rabbit sewn up in the carcase of an ox, suffocating no doubt, but starving too, amid all those basketfuls of meat, for the true food.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K

“You're a baby, said Robert. You've been asleep all your life. It's time to wake up. Why do you think they give you charity, you and the children? Because they think you are harmless, your eyes aren't opened, you don't see the truth around you.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“–Mi madre se pasó la vida trabajando. Fregaba los suelos de otros, cocinaba para ellos, lavaba sus platos. Lavaba su ropa sucia. Fregaba sus baños después de que los usaran. Se arrodillaba y limpiaba el retrete. Pero cuando estaba vieja y enferma, la olvidaron. La apartaron de su vista. Cuando murió, la arrojaron al fuego.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Vida y época de Michael K

“Pero sobre todo, a medida que el verano llegaba a su fin, aprendió a amar la indolencia, no la indolencia de los fragmentos de libertad robados furtivamente al trabajo forzado, hurtos clandestinos saboreados en cuclillas tras un macizo de flores con el rastrillo entre las manos, sino la de una entrega de su ser al tiempo, a un tiempo que discurría tan lentamente como el aceite de un horizonte a otro de la cara del mundo, lavando su cuerpo, circulando por las axilas e ingles, agitando sus párpados.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Vida y época de Michael K