Waiting For The Barbarians Quotes
"I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire."
"He tells me they are a new invention. ‘They protect one’s eyes against the glare of the sun,’ he says."
"‘Colonel Joll is from the Third Bureau,’ I tell them. ‘The Third Bureau is the most important division of the Civil Guard nowadays.’"
"I awake before dawn and tiptoe past the sleeping soldiers, who are stirring and sighing, dreaming of mothers and sweethearts, down the steps."
"‘We do not have facilities for prisoners,’ I explain."
"‘Excellency,’ he says. His voice croaks; he clears his throat. ‘Excellency, we know nothing about thieving.'"
"Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt."
"For the rest I watch the sun rise and set, eat and sleep and am content."
"‘First I get lies, you see – this is what happens – first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth.’"
"‘Did the officer tell you what to say to me?’ I ask him softly."
"‘But I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.’"
"‘Why do I have to carry you about from woman to woman, I asked: simply because you were born without legs?'"
"It is nothing but a matter of age, of cycles of desire and apathy in a body that is slowly cooling and dying."
"Captivated by her performance, I open my eyes in the midst of all the fluttering and shivering and moaning, then sink back into the dark river of my own pleasure."
"I spend three days of sensual languor, heavy-lidded, sleekly aroused, daydreaming."
"I detect in myself a reluctance, a resistance. My regard remains dazedly fixed on the marrows, on the gleam of light on their wet skins."
"Is she truly so featureless? With an effort I concentrate my mind on her."
"What this woman beside me is doing in my life I cannot comprehend."
"I clasp my arms around my knees and concentrate."
"The sooner the barbarians understand that the better."
"A man with the waist of a boy and the muscular arms of a streetfighter crammed into the lilac-blue uniform that the Bureau has created for itself."
"I am not sure that he understands me. ‘The natives are at war with us,’ he says."
"I pray for the day when these walls will be levelled and the unquiet echoes can finally take wing."
"I am forgetting the girl. Drifting towards sleep, it comes to me with cold clarity that a whole day has passed in which I have not thought of her."
"The texture of the days, on the other hand, is as dull as porridge."
"I am aware of the source of my elation: my alliance with the guardians of the Empire is over, I have set myself in opposition, the bond is broken, I am a free man."
"I think about him a great deal in the solitude of my cell, trying to understand his animosity, trying to see myself as he sees me."
"Though the guards have orders not to discuss anything with me, it is not difficult to stitch together into a coherent story the snatches of talk I hear on my outings into the yard."
"I am forgetting her, and forgetting her, I know, deliberately."
"The stars twinkle out of a clear black sky. Through the bars of the yard gate comes the gleam of a fire on the square beyond."
"One strand begins to separate from the skein: the sleeper at my feet breathes fast, at each exhalation giving a little moan."
"Fingers as light as a butterfly’s wing touch my ankle."
"‘I will bring you water,’ I whisper in his ear, ‘but then you must promise to be quiet.'"
"‘I’m so hot!’ he groans. He wants to throw his blanket aside but I restrain him."
"Like a wounded snail I begin to creep along the wall towards the dark mouth of the first street leading off the square."
"The shadow beside the gate has not moved. Perhaps there is nothing there, perhaps only an old sack or a stack of firewood."
"I tiptoe out, hobble down the stairs in the blinding glare of the sun."
"The earthwork itself, the low mud wall that runs for nearly two miles and keeps the lake-water in check when it rises to its summer limit, has been repaired."
"For an hour at least, while I could be pursuing my escape, I lie there, hearing through the open window the sighs of the sleepers, the voice of the boy mumbling to himself."
"The wind is rising: already flying sand has banked up against my side."
"Our only excuse is that we leave no mark of our own on the girls who pass through our hands: our convoluted desires, our ritualized lovemaking, our elephantine ecstasies are soon forgotten."
"But we live in a world of laws,' I said to my poor prisoner, 'a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures."
"I think of a young peasant who was once brought before me... 'We cannot just do as we wish,' I lectured him. 'We are all subject to the law, which is greater than any of us.'"
"I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms."
"I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects."
"‘When some men suffer unjustly,’ I said to myself, ‘it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.’"
"‘No one who paid a visit to this oasis,’ I write, ‘failed to be struck by the charm of life here. We lived in the time of the seasons, of the harvests, of the migrations of the waterbirds.'"
"‘Perhaps by the end of the winter,’ I think, ‘when hunger truly bites us, when we are cold and starving... perhaps then I will... begin to tell the truth.’"
"‘But when the barbarians taste bread, new bread and mulberry jam... they will be won over to our ways.'"
"‘There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it.’"