"Like the mythical Orpheus who traveled to the underworld in an attempt to coax Eurydice ‘out of the entrails of hell’, ‘walking backwards step by step, whispering the dead woman’s name’, Dostoevsky would like to resurrect his son. He is ‘trying to cast a spell. But over whom: over a ghost or over himself?’"

"He is in a rage with everyone who is alive when his child is dead. In a rage most of all against this girl, whom for her very meekness he would like to tear limb from limb."

"No one kills himself, Matryosha. You can put your life in danger but you cannot actually kill yourself. It is more likely that Pavel put himself at risk, to see whether God loved him enough to save him."

"barely enough for a shake of the head"

"they’ve taken it all from me. Nearly everything. Not much left. But they won’t get that. You hear me? If they get that there would have been no sense at all"

"Instructions have been given to maintain law and order at all costs,"

"in the crowd surrounded and stormed by the police"

"greatest weapon against injustice is the courage to speak out."

"I have tried to accept that responsibility one owes to one’s society and one’s time"

"of natural causes"

"an apparatus of laws, regulations and bureaucracies” that would develop into “the most elaborate racial edifice the world had ever witnessed"

"[7/22, 7:03 AM] Grace Carrier: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

"When the law fails to protect the innocent, it becomes the duty of the people to rise up and demand justice."

"Then, one day, you discover that life itself is slipping past and you’re just a bloody parasite, something white and maggot-like, not really a human being, just a thing, a sweet and ineffectual thing. And even if you try to call for help, they don’t understand you. They don’t even hear you. Or they think it’s just a new craze and start doing their best to humour you"

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

"Happiness? It was one of the saddest nights of my life, an ageless sadness that insinuated itself into the very heart of this new world and deepened slowly into anguish and agony. There she was sleeping, closer to me than anyone had ever been to me, exposed and available, utterly trusting, at my disposal to love, to look at, to touch, to explore, to enter: and yet, in that peaceful deep sleep more remote than any star, ungraspable, forever, apart. I knew her eyes and the inside of her mouth, her nipples in rest and arousal, every limb of her slight smooth body, every individual finger and toe; I could examine if I wished each secret hair. And yet it amounted to nothing, nothing at all. Our bodies had joined and turned and clasped, and shared the spasms of pleasure and of pain. But having touched, we were again separate; and in her sleep, as she smiled, or whimpered, or lay breathing quietly, she was as far from me as if we'd never met. I wanted to cry. But the ache was too deep to be relieved by tears."

"The time for silence is over. The time for action is now."

"As for your Spanish, don’t worry, persist. One day it will cease to feel like a language, it will become the way things are."

"Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and discover for themselves their integrity and affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption."

"(Chapter 3)"

"I say I do not want to be put to sleep. The truth is, without sleep I cannot endure. Whatever else it brings, the Diconal at least brings sleep or a simulacrum of sleep. As the pain recedes, as time quickens, as the horizon lifts, my attention, concentrated like a burning-glass on the pain, can slacken for a while; I can draw breath, unclench my hailed hands, straighten my legs."

"He is a teacher, I thought: that is why he speaks so well. What he is doing to me he has practiced in the classroom. It is the trick one uses to make one’s own answer seem to come from the child. Ventriloquism, the legacy of Socrates, as oppressive in Africa as it was in Athens."

"(Chapter 4)"

"The country smoulders, yet with the best will in the world I can only half-attend. My true attention is all inward, upon the thing, the word, the word for the thing inching through my body. An ignominious occupation, and in times like these ridiculous too, as a banker with his clothes on fire is a joke while a burning beggar is not. Yet I cannot help myself. “Look at me!” I want to cry to Florence – “I too am burning!”"

"(Chapter 2 )"

"I had never been so close to death before.For a long time, as I lay there trying to clear my mind, I couldn't think coherently at all, conscious only of a terrible, blind bitterness. Why had they singled me out? Didn't they understand? Had everything I'd gone through on their behalf been utterly in vain? Did it really count for nothing? What had happened to logic, meaning and sense? But I feel much calmer now. It helps to discipline oneself like this, writing it down to see it set out on paper, to try and weigh it and find some significance in it.Prof Bruwer: There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.I wanted to help.Right I meant it very sincerely. But I wanted to do it on my terms. And I am white, and they are black. I thought it was still possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. I thought that to reach out and touch hands across the gulf would be sufficient in itself. But I grasped so little, really: as if good intentions from my side could solve it all. It was presumptuous of me. In an ordinary world, in a natural one, I might have succeeded. But not in this deranged, divided age. I can do all I can for Gordon or scores of others who have come to me; I can imagine myself in their shoes, I can project myself into their suffering. But I cannot, ever, live their lives for them. So what else could come of it but failure? Whether I like it or not, whether I feel like cursing my own condition or not and that would only serve to confirm my impotence I am white. This is the small, final, terrifying truth of my broken world. I am white. And because I am white I am born into a state of privilege. Even if I fight the system that has reduced us to this I remain white, and favored by the very circumstances I abhor. Even if I'm hated, and ostracized, and persecuted, and in the end destroyed, nothing can make me black. And so those who are cannot but remain suspicious of me. In their eyes my very efforts to identify myself with Gordon, whit all the Gordons, would be obscene. Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and discover for themselves their integrity and affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption? On the other hand: what can I do but what I have done? I cannot choose not to intervene: that would be a denial and a mockery not only of everything I believe in, but of the hope that compassion may survive among men. By not acting as I did I would deny the very possibility of that gulf to be bridged.If I act, I cannot but lose. But if I do not act, it is a different kind of defeat, equally decisive and maybe worse. Because then I will not even have a conscience left.The end seems ineluctable: failure, defeat, loss. The only choice I have left is whether I am prepared to salvage a little honour, a little decency, a little humanity -- or nothing. It seems as if a sacrifice is impossible to avoid, whatever way one looks at it. But at least one has the choice between a wholly futile sacrifice and one that might, in the long run, open up a possibility, however negligible or dubious, of something better, less sordid and more noble, for our children.They live on. We, the fathers,have lost."

"Perhaps I should simply accept that that is how one must live from now on: in a state of shame. Perhaps shame is nothing more than the name for the way I feel all the time. The name for the way in which people live who would prefer to be dead.”"

"The contagions and infections in their blood consumed in liquid flame. Cleaners-up after the feast. Flies, dry-winged, glazen-eyed, pitiless. My heirs."

"(Curren, p. 5)"

"(Curren, p. 195)"

"There is an alley down the side of the garage, you may remember it, you and your friends would sometimes play there. Now it is a dead place, waste, without use, where windblown leaves pile up and rot."

"(Chapter 1 )"

"How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.Alone. Alone to the very end. I… every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?"

"A recreation area, you call it on the back of the photograph. The lake tamed, the forest tamed, renamed."

"You are here to find your mother. I am here to help you.’"

"Grief past weeping. I am hollow, I am a shell. To each of us fate sends the right disease. Mine a disease that eats me out from inside. Were I to be opened up they would find me hollow as a doll, a doll with a crab sitting inside licking its lips, dazed by the flood of light."

"(Curren, p. 112)"

"(Curren, p. 50)"

"Ugliness: what is it but the soul showing through the flesh?"

"He is not a rubbish person. ... There are no rubbish people. We are all people together."

"(Curren, p. 47)"

"(Curren, p. 132)"

"Children of iron, I thought. Florence herself, too, not unlike iron. The age of iron. After which comes the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age of earth?"

"I think of prisoners standing on the brink of the trench into which their bodies will tumble. They plead with the firing squad, they weep, they joke, they offer bribes, they offer everything they possess: the rings off their fingers, the clothes off their backs. The soldiers laugh. For they will take it all anyway, and the gold from their teeth too."

"(Curren, p. 26)"

"(Curren, p. 7)"

"I cannot tell the children what to do. ... It is all changed today. There are no more mothers and fathers."

"We embrace to be embraced. We embrace our children to be folded in the arms of the future, to pass ourselves on beyond death, to be transported. That it how it was when I embraced you, always. We bear children in order to be mothered by them."

"(Florence, p. 39)"

"I am here in my bed but I am there in Florence's room, too, with its one window and one door and no other way out."