“Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.”

“He does not know what freedom is. Freedom is a word, less than a word, a noise, one of the multitude of noises I make when I open my mouth.”

“He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.”

“Worte entfremden. Sprache ist kein Medium für Begehren. Begehren ist Hingerissensein, nicht Austausch. Nur dadurch, dass die Sprache das Begehrte entfremdet, beherrscht sie es.”

“He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable.”

“Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory--speaking at the highest level--of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it.”

“The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.”