Quotes from Damon Galgut

They are being driven by a psychopathic Indian apparently bent on killing them all, overtaking on blind rises, racing some other bus to settle an old score, hurtling into corners without slowing down.

Coldly furious now, the steel showing.

Il avait plutôt l'impression d'être tombé dans l'amour, avec Mohammed : dans un petit espace circulaire au centre même de son existence, où rien, pratiquement, ne faisait de l'ombre.

Something in him has changed, he can't seem to connect properly with the world. He feels this not as a failure of the world but as a massive failing in himself, he would like to change it but doesn't know how. In his clearest moments he thinks that he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.

He is haggard, he is pale. A handsome young man, brown eyes and brown hair, something in his face that will never be at ease.

For she too has her little pains, and they wear her out, though she does not speak of them, or is not asked, and when they show themselves it tends to be when she's alone.

I don't like leaving the road, my sense of vulnerability deepens, a sort of primal nervousness descends. But this is also one of the most compelling elements in travel, the feeling of dread underneath everything, it makes sensations heightened and acute, the world is charged with a power it doesn't have in ordinary life.

It is always an attractive moment when curiosity takes hold.

The dialogue and the gestures are tinny and false, like some kind of bright paper wrapped around the meaning of the moment.

When the girl herself is absent, the room is like a blank page, almost no marks or clues to say anything about her, which perhaps does say something about her.

She herself has been taken by surprise at how much it matters to her, this buried question from long ago. She has thought of Salome many times over the years, of course she has. Whenever her mind has strayed in the direction of home, or no, that is, the farm, not her home any more, whenever her mind strays to the farm there lots of stones to turn over, and Salome is one of them. But that particular stone never seems to find a resting place, no matter how often it's turned.

Why did people believe it was only the flesh that binds?

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.

Survival isn't instructive, just demeaning.

But even when the words are repeated, they don't seem attached to the world. No. That can't be true. That doesn't make sense. Only last night he. That doesn't fit. No. No, she says. But refusal only works on other people, on fate it has no effect.

But it's in the nature of news, especially bad news, that it wants to be passed on, it desires transmission, like a virus.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. The words come to him from a long way off.

De geest deinst terug voor zijn eigen afwezigheid, kan niet aan zichzelf denken als niet-denkend, de kilste leegte die er is.

Veel van de levenden zijn ook vaag en op drift, die tekortkoming is niet louter aan overledenen voorbehouden.

Onderweg waarheen? Die vraag lijkt nog aan discussie onderhevig.

I am happy to see you, Masood." "Happy? Happy? What a pale, pathetic English word. You must not be 'happy' to see me. No, you must be enraptured, transported! You must be overjoyed . I have no use for 'happy'.

She has recently lost her virginity, to a boy she met at the ice rink, and sex flows through her like a golden wind. She has forgotten the pain, though it's part of the shimmer around the faces of young men, with their bristly

Wat altijd gebeurt als ze nadenkt over doodgaan. Je lichaam weet, ook al houden je hersens zich dom.

The idea that writers write books that have absolutely nothing to do with their personalities or lives, I think, is false. Your raw material is yourself. There is nothing else to draw on.