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Quotes from Life & Times of Michael K — J. M. Coetzee

born 1940 South Africa

← All quotes by J. M. Coetzee

18 quotes

But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we've got here?

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

Can't you tell the difference between a thin man and a skeleton?

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

Though he had no more business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital.

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

You want to stop on the expressway, you pull fifty metres off the roadside...Anything nearer, you can get shot, no warning, no questions asked.'

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help.

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

If she was going to die, she would at least die under blue skies

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

Michael K sat ... watching his mother polish other people's floors, learning to be quiet.

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see.

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

I discovered out in the country ... that there is time enough for everything

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

As time passed, however, I slowly began to see the originality of the resistance you offered

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

Perhaps, [Michael] thought, it was better when one did not have to rely on other people

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

He could not imagine ... driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

There seemed nothing to do but live.

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

I am looking for such a place in order to settle there, perhaps only till things improve, perhaps forever. I am not so foolish, however, as to imagine that I can rely on maps and roads to guide me.

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: J. M. Coetzee (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.