Life and times of Michael K

Life and times of Michael K (1983) by J. M. Coetzee is a 1983 novel by South African-born writer J. M. Coetzee. The novel won the Booker Prize for 1983. The novel is a story of a man named Michael K, who makes an arduous journey from Cape Town to his mother's rural birthplace, amid a fictitious civil war during the apartheid era, in the 1970-80s.

Quotes

 * You want to stop on the expressway, you pull fifty metres off the roadside...Anything nearer, you can get shot, no warning, no questions asked.'
 * Chapter one


 * Perhaps, [Michael] thought, it was better when one did not have to rely on other people
 * Chapter one part one
 * Michael K sat ... watching his mother polish other people's floors, learning to be quiet.
 * Chapter one part one
 * If she was going to die, she would at least die under blue skies
 * Chapter one part one
 * Though he had no more business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital. ** Chapter one part one
 * He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help.
 * Chapter one part one
 * There seemed nothing to do but live
 * Chapter one part two
 * But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we've got here?
 * Chapter one part two
 * They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die
 * Chapter one part two
 * He could not imagine ... driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land
 * Chapter one part two
 * His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong
 * Chapter one part two
 * Can't you tell the difference between a thin man and a skeleton?
 * Chapter two
 * There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas
 * Chapter two
 * As time passed, however, I slowly began to see the originality of the resistance you offered
 * Chapter two
 * I discovered out in the country ... that there is time enough for everything
 * Chapter three