The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
J. M. CoetzeeSleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
J. M. CoetzeeIn a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them? (Susan Barton)
J. M. Coetzee