Our Lies

“Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“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.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.”
― J.M. Coetzee

“But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace