Linguists From South Africa

"But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place: a great rocky hill with a flat top, rising sharply from the sea on all sides except one, dotted with drab bushes that never flowered and never shed their leaves."

"Crushed under his soles whole clusters of the thorns that had pierced my skin."

"The stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of)."

"Would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, he no longer knew for sure what truth, what fancy."

"Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering."

"At last I could row no further."

"But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate."

"Not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway by heart."

"I would rather be the author of my story than have lies told about me."

"It was I who shared Cruso's bed and closed Cruso's eyes."

"A being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso."

"To live in silence is to live like the whales."

"The less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like tombs."

"In a sea of fallen leaves we sit, she and I, two substantial beings."

"He is the child of his silence."

"I do not love him, but he is mine."

"We can bring [the island] to life only by setting it within a larger story."

"Cannibals are no less dull than Englishmen."

"I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story."

"This is the place where bodies are their own signs."

"I will leave behind my terraces and walls," he said. "They will be enough. They will be more than enough.”"

"Perhaps they wanted to prevent him from ever telling his story, who he was, where his home lay, how it came about that he was taken."

"I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of a castaway is a castaway at heart"

"Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe. That is my entreaty."

"To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes…"

"To hold us in check when our desires grow immoderate. As long as our desires are moderate we have no need of laws."

"My thoughts ran to Friday… Had I not been there to restrain him, would he in his hunger have eaten the babe? I told myself I did him wrong to think of him as a cannibal or worse, a devourer of the dead. But Cruso had planted the seed in my mind, and now I could not look on Friday’s lips without calling to mind what mean must once have passed them."

"I am not a story, Mr Foe…I choose rather to tell of the Island, of myself and Crusoe and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire."

"This is the place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday."

"Seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beast he has slain."

"If Providence were to watch over all of us,” said Cruso, “who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometimes wake and sometimes sleep, as lower creatures do.”"

"When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: of being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso."

"To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades."

"Day by day the wind picks at the roof and the weeds creep across the terraces."

"I tell myself I talked to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will."

"It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau."

"You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we lead on Cruso’s island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day."

"“You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”"

"To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force. I mean the executioner and his assistants, both great and small. If I were the Irish woman, I should rest most uneasy in my grave knowing to what interpreter the story of my last hours has been consigned."

"If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain."

"But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies have their own signs. It is the home of Friday."

"The new wife is a lazy big boned voluptuous feline woman…"

"unused body now dusty, dry, unsavoury"

"I am… a farmgirl… not unaware that there is a hole between my legs that has never been filled."

"“I am a child,” she tells him, “Despite my years, I am an old child, a sinister old child full of stale juices. Someone should make a woman of me… , someone should make a hole in me to let the old juices run out.”"

"Coming to the farm from Worcester, where Coloured people seem to have to beg for whatever they get, he is relieved at how correct and formal relations are between his uncle and the volk. Each morning, his uncle confers with his two men about the day's tasks. He does not give them orders. Instead he proposes the tasks that need to be done, as if dealing cards on a table; his men deal their own cards too. In between, there are pauses, long, reflective silences in which nothing happens."

"The secret and sacred word that binds him to the farm is 'belong'. Out in the veld by himself he can breathe the word aloud: I belong on the farm. What he really believes but does not utter, what he keeps to himself for fear that the spell will end, is a different form of the word: I belong to the farm. He tells no one because the word is misunderstood so easily, turned so easily to its inverse: The farm belongs to me. The farm will never belong to him, he will never be more than a visitor: he accepts that."

"Sometimes when he is among the sheep — when they have been rounded up to be dipped, and are penned tight and cannot get away — he wants to whisper to them, warn them of what lies in store. But then in their yellow eyes he catches a glimpse of something that silences him: a resignation, a foreknowledge not only of what happens to sheep at the hands of Ros behind the shed, but of what awaits them at the end of their long, thirsty ride to Cape Town on the transport lorry. They know it all, down to the finest detail, and yet they submit. They have calculated the price and are prepared to pay it — the price of being on earth, the price of being alive."

"The boy is special, Aunt Annie told his mother, and his mother in turn told him. But what kind of special? No one ever says."

"He is angry at his mother for not having normal children and making them live a normal life."