Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It’s not our fault, it’s theirs. We’re just their children.
The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.
For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.
Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.
The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.
To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.
Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.
Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?
The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.
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.
What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one’s bones and then one day without warning flood out.
Maybe. But in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.’ Like falling in love. Do the young still fall in love, or is that mechanism obsolete by now, unnecessary, quaint, like steam locomotion? He is out of touch, out of date. Falling in love could have fallen out of fashion and come back again half a dozen times, for all he knows.
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.
For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology.
The sun’s touch is kind.
Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.
Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.