Age of Iron

Age of Iron (published 1990) is a play by J M Coetzee A South African Nobel Prize winner. It is among his most popular works and was the 1990 Sunday Express Book of the Year

Quotes

• He is not a rubbish person," I said, lowering my voice, speaking to Florence alone. "There are no rubbish people. We are all people together."
  • Chapter 2, paragraph 83

• In my day, I thought, policemen spoke respectfully to ladies. In my day children did not set fire to schools. In my day: a phrase one came across in this day only in letters to the editor. Old men and women, trembling with just fury, taking up the pen, weapon of last resort. In my day, now over; in my life, now past.
  • Chapter 2 paragraph 121.

• Evil king tells his people that his evil deeds are for their own good. And they’ll lie to themselves that he’s right because that’s the easiest thing to do. But soon the evil king will run out of enemies, and the people who helped him will become his victims. Then they’ll regret it, but it’s too late!” Ragnall

Angus Watson

• There I lay in the dark listening to the music of the stars and the crackling and humming that accompanied it like the dust of meteors, smiling, my heart filled with gratitude for this good news...
  • Part One, p. 23

• "When I was a child," I said, "I used to go downhills on a bicycle with no brakes to speak of. It belonged to my elder brother. He would dare me. I was completely without fear. Children cannot conceive of what it is to die. It never crosses their minds that they may not be immortal."
  • Part One, p. 16

• They work with the police,” said Bheki. “They are all, the same, the ambulances, the doctors, the police.”

“That is nonsense,” I said.

“Nobody trusts the ambulance any more. They are always talking to the police on their radios.”

“Nonsense.”

• We embrace to be embraced. We embrace our children to be folded in the arms of the future, to pass ourselves on beyond death, to be transported. That it how it was when I embraced you, always. We bear children in order to be mothered by them.
  • Part One, p. 5
• Their residence the limbo of the unborn, their innocence the innocence of bee grubs, plump and white, drenched in honey, absorbing sweetness through their soft skins. Slumbrous their souls, bliss-filled, abstracted.

• (Curren, p. 7)
• I think of prisoners standing on the brink of the trench into which their bodies will tumble. They plead with the firing squad, they weep, they joke, they offer bribes, they offer everything they possess: the rings off their fingers, the clothes off their backs. The soldiers laugh. For they will take it all anyway, and the gold from their teeth too.

• (Curren, p. 26)
• I cannot tell the children what to do. ... It is all changed today. There are no more mothers and fathers.

• (Florence, p. 39)
• He is not a rubbish person. ... There are no rubbish people. We are all people together.

• (Curren, p. 47)
• Children of iron, I thought. Florence herself, too, not unlike iron. The age of iron. After which comes the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age of earth?

• (Curren, p. 50)
• Grief past weeping. I am hollow, I am a shell. To each of us fate sends the right disease. Mine a disease that eats me out from inside. Were I to be opened up they would find me hollow as a doll, a doll with a crab sitting inside licking its lips, dazed by the flood of light.

• (Curren, p. 112)
• Ugliness: what is it but the soul showing through the flesh?

• (Curren, p. 132)
• I am here in my bed but I am there in Florence's room, too, with its one window and one door and no other way out.

• (Curren, p. 175)
• A recreation area, you call it on the back of the photograph. The lake tamed, the forest tamed, renamed.

• (Curren, p. 195)
• The contagions and infections in their blood consumed in liquid flame. Cleaners-up after the feast. Flies, dry-winged, glazen-eyed, pitiless. My heirs.

• (Curren, p. 5)
• There is an alley down the side of the garage, you may remember it, you and your friends would sometimes play there. Now it is a dead place, waste, without use, where windblown leaves pile up and rot.
• (Chapter 1 )
• The country smoulders, yet with the best will in the world I can only half-attend. My true attention is all inward, upon the thing, the word, the word for the thing inching through my body. An ignominious occupation, and in times like these ridiculous too, as a banker with his clothes on fire is a joke while a burning beggar is not. Yet I cannot help myself. “Look at me!” I want to cry to Florence – “I too am burning!”
• (Chapter 2 )
• Perhaps I should simply accept that that is how one must live from now on: in a state of shame. Perhaps shame is nothing more than the name for the way I feel all the time. The name for the way in which people live who would prefer to be dead.”
• (Chapter 2 )
• He is a teacher, I thought: that is why he speaks so well. What he is doing to me he has practiced in the classroom. It is the trick one uses to make one’s own answer seem to come from the child. Ventriloquism, the legacy of Socrates, as oppressive in Africa as it was in Athens.
• (Chapter 3)
• I say I do not want to be put to sleep. The truth is, without sleep I cannot endure. Whatever else it brings, the Diconal at least brings sleep or a simulacrum of sleep. As the pain recedes, as time quickens, as the horizon lifts, my attention, concentrated like a burning-glass on the pain, can slacken for a while; I can draw breath, unclench my hailed hands, straighten my legs.
• (Chapter 4)

External Links

https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/age-of-iron/principles-quotes.html https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/41901002-age-of-iron

• Age of Iron
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