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The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka—Poles, for the most part—said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in a general way they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake.

— J. M. Coetzee The Lives of Animals (1999)

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More quotes by J. M. Coetzee

There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars.

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

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He is here, with her, out of love. *He cannot imagine her getting through this trial without him at her side.”

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

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She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man.

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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.