We Are Surrounded

“But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?”
― J.M. Coetzee, Youth

“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”
― J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals

“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.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace