"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."

"Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence."

"To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy."

"The sun's touch is kind."

"...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?"

"Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe."

"Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?"

"Perhaps it does us good to have a fall every now and then. As long as we don't break."

"If i were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism"

"The jackal rips out the hare's bowels, but the world rolls on."

"If only we could eat our sunsets, I say, we would all be full."

"There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason."

"The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty."

"He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa."

"The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard." --Disgrace"

"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."

"Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict."

"His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72)."

"I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted."

"There seemed nothing to do but live."

"And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant"

"I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best."

"Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined."

"He does not know what freedom is. Freedom is a word, less than a word, a noise, one of the multitude of noises I make when I open my mouth."