Slow Man Quotes

“Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“I am not the we of anyone”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“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.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“لا أستطيع أن أعبر لك عن مدى إرهاقى.
ليس إرهاقاً يمكن علاجه بالنوم ليلة هادئة فى سرير حقيقى، الإرهاق الذى أقصده صار جزءاً منى.يشبه الصبغة التى تتسرب إلى كل ما أفعله، وكل ما أقوله، أشعر، بتعبير هوميروس، أننى مرخية الأوتار، لم تعد هناك قوة شد.
ارتخى وتر القوس الذى اعتاد أن يكون مشدوداً، صار مثل جديلة من القطن، وهذا ليس حال الجسد فقط. العقل أيضاً : مرتخ، مستعد لنوم هادئ.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“...So that someone might want to put you in a book...So that you may be worth putting in a book...Live like a hero...Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“...he seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that turn into black gloom. He likes to think that they comes from elsewhere, episodes of bad weather that cross the sky and pass on. He prefers not to think they come from inside him and are his, part of him.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“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.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“That was why, later on, he began to lose interest in photography: first when colour took over, then when it became plain that the old magic of light-sensitive emulsions was waning, that to the rising generation the enchantment lay in a techne of images without substance, images that could flash through the ether without residing anywhere, that could be sucked into a machine and emerge from it doctored, untrue. He gave up recording the world in photographs then, and transferred his energies to saving the past.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“هناك ما أطلق عليهم الارضيين، أولئك الذىن يقفون وأقدامهم مغروسة فى الأرض التى ولدوا فيها، وهنالك الفراشات، مخلوقات الضوء والهواء، سكان مؤقتون، يحطون هنا وهناك ، تزعم أنك فراشة، تريد ان تكون فراشة، وذات يوم تقع وقعة مفجعة، تُصدم وتسقط على الأرض ، وحين تلتقط أنفاسك تجد انك لم تعد تستطيع الطيران مثل كائن أثيرى ولا تستطيع المشى، لست سوى كتلة من اللحم الجامد، إنه بالتأكيد درس واضح لا يمكن أن تغمض عينيك وتصم أذنيك أمامه .”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Fate deals you a hand, and you play the hand you are dealt. You do not whine, you do not complain. That, he used to believe, was his philosophy. Why then can he not resist these plunges into darkness?”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“If there were a way of putting an end to himself by some purely mental act he would put an end to himself at once, without further ado. His mind is full of stories of people who bring about their end - who methodically pay bills, write goodbye notes, burn old love letters, label keys, and then, once everything is in order, don their Sunday best and swallow down pills they have hoarded for the occasion and settle themselves on their neatly made beds and compose features for oblivion. Heroes all of them, unsung, unlauded. I am resolved not to be of any trouble.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“The sun's touch is kind.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“... but what do slow and fast matter any more?”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“This is what it leads to! This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for a moment!”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“The heart can be a mysterious organ, the heart and its movements. Dark, the Spanish call it. The dark heart, el oscuro cotazón. Are you sure you are not just a little dark-hearted, Paul, despite your many good intentions?”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Truth is not spoken in anger.Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“He would never want to diminish that event, that blow. It was nothing less than a calamity. It has shrunk his world, turned him into a prisoner. But escaping death ought to have shaken him up, opened windows inside him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before , only greyer and drearier. Enough to drive one to drink.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“We have children in order that we may learn to love and serve. Through our children we become the servants of time.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Despite Marijana's bracing presence, he seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that turn into black gloom. He likes to think they come from elsewhere, episodes of bad weather that cross the sky and pass on. He prefers not to think they come from inside him and are his, part of him”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Never is he going to be his old self again. Never is he going to have his old resilience. Whatever inside him was given the task of mending the organism after it was so terribly assaulted, first on the road, then in the operating theatre, has grown too tired of the job, too overburdened. And the same holds for the rest of the team, the lungs, the heart, the muscles, the brain. They did for him what they could as long as they could; now they want to rest.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Photographs is not the same as just name, is more living. Otherwise, why save photographs? (Marijana to Mr Rayment)”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Pain is nothing, just a warning signal from the body to the brain. Pain is no more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing. Biut of course he is wrong.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“What do we call it when someone knows the worst about us, the worst and most wounding, and does not come out with it but on the contrary suppresses it and continues to smile on us and make little jokes? We call it affection.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Much of the time you think I am talking rubbish, making things up as I go.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Those into whose lives you are born do not pass away.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“As you speak I swear I can hear words being selected, one after another, from the word-box you carry around with you, and slotted into place. That is not how a true native speak, one who is born into a language.’

‘How does a native speak?’

‘From the heart. Words well up within and he sings them, sings along with them. So to speak.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man