Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
J.M. Coetzee
courage heroism live-life
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.
grace gardening earth
(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.
kindness guilt generosity retribution
Es ist nicht die Sprache, die den Menschen zum Menschen macht, sondern die Sprache der anderen.
language
Vielleicht ist es so, dass nur das, was nicht ausgesprochen worden ist, durchlebt werden muss.
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.
soul language song speech emptiness
Von allen Abenteuern ist Selbstmord das literarischste, mehr noch als Mord.
literature murder suicide
Vergnügen ist Mangelware, aber an Schmerz ist heute überall ranzukommen.
pain entertainment
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 else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.
peace tyranny sympathy cruelty isolation
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
sleep
So funktioniert Höflichkeit. Man pflegt Beziehungen mit Leuten, auch wenn man sie nicht mag.
society
From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say.
earth seed
How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, walls, pylons? Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard to achieve after all. Why then does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?
immortality
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 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.
illusion photography
No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice).
truths
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