Quotes from Damon Galgut

Odd how certain people, often random individuals, can pulse with significance in your thoughts, your dreams

Past a certain point, maybe, a person's character defines itself and stays fixed in your mind.

Waiting in respectful silence is an essential part of the job and he has developed the capacity to simulate deep calm while experiencing none of it. In his core, Mervyn Glass is a frantic man.

Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It's just the living part we still have to work out.

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

She feels ugly when she cries, like a tomato breaking open

if you are names without a nature, it's not because I don't remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it's for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there's only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it's all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of life.

Oh, i can deal with the tragedy, it's the farce I can't handle.

What he sensed more than anything else was kindness – a kindness of a human and immediate sort. It was surprising how very radical this simple emotion could be.

No love left, only kindness

How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it's not a failing unique to the departed.

But you think there's an order, you think your actions matter, that they'll be weighed and judged in some final reckoning. But there is no reckoning. For each of us, death is the last day.

There were some, naturally, who would understand, and he wrote for them, or for himself. Anyhow, some idealised reader who would accept everything, and forgive.

A human figure approaching, filling itself in slowly, putting on age and sex and race, like items of clothing

Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences.

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

I think the impulse took shape in early childhood when I was very ill with lymphoma for a number of years. I spent a lot of time in hospitals and sick-rooms, being read to by various relatives, and I learned to associate books with love and attention.

Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.

The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason. Understanding made sadness easier to bear.

To be honest and to be fair were not always the same thing.

time is a river that washes the world away.

You understand, he says, people don't always take what you give to them. Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time.

His footsteps sound hesitant, but he doesn't turn back. Nor will the moment return, which is true of all moments, though not equally.

Most of their conversations are in the past by now. They've reached that stage in the proceedings and both of them know it and don't speak of that either. But there is still great softness in two hands linked together on a tabletop.