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He does not as yet know England well enough to do England in prose. He is not even sure he can do the parts of London he is familiar with, the London of crowds trudging to work, of cold and rain, of bedsitters with curtainless windows and forty-watt bulbs. — Chapter 7, page 63.

— J. M. Coetzee Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: J. M. Coetzee (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.