Disgrace David Lurie Quotes

Driving home from a concert that evening, he stops at a traffic light. A motorcycle throbs past, a silver Ducati bearing two figures in black. They wear helmets, but he recognizes them nevertheless. Melanie, on the pillion, sits with knees wide apart, pelvis arched. A quick shudder of lust tugs him. I have been there! he thinks. Then the motorcycle surges forward, bearing her away. (4.64)

"I was not myself. I was no longer a fifty-year-old divorcé at a loose end. I became a servant of Eros." (6.63)

He wonders how it is for Lucy with her lovers, how it is for her lovers with her. He has never been afraid to follow a thought down its winding track, and he is not afraid now. Has he fathered a woman of passion? What can she draw on, what not, in the realm of the senses? Are he and she capable of talking about that too? (9.12)

Would they dare to share a bed while he was in the house? If the bed creaked in the night, would they be embarrassed? Embarrassed enough to stop? But what does he know about what women do together? Maybe women do not need to make beds creak. (10.57)

Two blankets, one pink, one grey, smuggled from her home by a woman who in the last hour has probably bathed and powdered and anointed herself in readiness; who has, for all he knows, been powdering and anointing herself every Sunday, and storing blankets in the cabinet, just in case. Who thinks, because he comes from the big city, because there is scandal attached to his name, that he makes love to many women and expects to be made love to by every woman who crosses his path. […] Bev. Never did he dream he would sleep with a Bev. (17.26-27)

He sits down on the bed, draws her to him. In his arms she begins to sob miserably. Despite all, he feels a tingling of desire. "There, there," he whispers, trying to comfort her. "Tell me what is wrong." Almost he says, "Tell Daddy what is wrong." (3.82)

From the day his daughter was born he has felt for her nothing but the most spontaneous, most unstinting love. Impossible she has been unaware of it. Has it been too much, that love? Has she found it a burden? Has it pressed down on her? Has she given it a darker reading? (9.11)

What does he really want for Lucy? Not that she should be forever a child, forever innocent, forever his—certainly not that. But he is a father, that is his fate, and as a father grows older he turns more and more—it cannot be helped—toward his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn. (10.58)

"Lucy and I are not getting on," he says. "Nothing remarkable in that, I suppose. Parents and children aren't made to live together. Under normal circumstances I would have moved out by now, gone back to Cape Town. But I can't leave Lucy alone on the farm. She isn't safe. I am trying to persuade her to hand over the operation to Petrus and take a break. But she won't listen to me." (16.42)

"Your child? Now he is your child, this Pollux?"

"Yes. He is a child. He is my family, my people."

So that is it. No more lies. My people. As naked an answer as he could wish. Well, Lucy is his people. (22.69-71)

A blow catches him on the crown of the head. He has time to think, If I am still conscious then I am all right, before his limbs turn to water and he crumples.

He is aware of being dragged across the kitchen floor. Then he blacks out. (11.71-72)

As he lies sprawled he is splashed from head to foot with liquid. His eyes burn, he tries to wipe them. He recognizes the smell: Methylated spirits. Struggling to get up, he is pushed back into the lavatory. The scrape of a match, and at once he is bathed in cool blue flame. (11.94)

"It happens every day, every hour, every minute, he tells himself, in every quarter of the country. Count yourself lucky to have escaped with your life. Count yourself lucky not to be a prisoner in the car at this moment, speeding away, or at the bottom of a donga with a bullet in your head. Count Lucy lucky too. Above all Lucy." (11.115)

"On the contrary, I understand all too well," he says. "I will pronounce the word we have avoided hitherto. You were raped. Multiply. By three men."

"And?"

"You were in fear of your life. You were afraid that after you had been used you would be killed. Disposed of. Because you were nothing to them."

"And?" Her voice is now a whisper.

"And I did nothing. I did nothing to save you." (18.81-85)

The flat of his hand catches the boy in the face. "You swine!" he shouts, and strikes him a second time, so that he staggers. "You filthy swine!" (22.4)

The word still rings in the air: Swine! Never has he felt such an elemental rage. He would like to give the boy what he deserves: a sound thrashing. Phrases that all his life he has avoided seem suddenly just and right: Teach him a lesson, Show him his place. So this is what it is like, he thinks! This is what it is like to be a savage! (23.5)

"After a certain age, all affairs are serious. Like heart attacks." (5.62)

He sighs again. How brief the summer, before the autumn and then the winter! (10.62)

He has a sense that, inside him, a vital organ has been bruised, abused—perhaps even his heart. For the first time he has a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future. (13.11)

"It was a male. Whenever there was a b**** in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn't know what to do. At the smell of a b**** it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide. […] There was something so ignoble in the spectacle that I despaired. One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. […] But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts." (11. 22)