Top 100 J.M. Coetzee Quotes
#1. Imagine: to be prepared to yield, to yield, to have nothing more to yield, to be broken, yet to be pressed to yield more!
J.M. Coetzee
#3. No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.
J.M. Coetzee
#4. Is that the moral of it all, he thought? the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything? Is that how morals come, unbidden, in the course of events, when you least expect them?
J.M. Coetzee
#5. She is no longer sure that people are always improved by what they read. Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed.
J.M. Coetzee
#6. I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.
J.M. Coetzee
#7. Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
#8. Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world, the same hard-eyed narrow-minded fanatics are busy, indifferent to life, in love with death.
J.M. Coetzee
#9. Faith means believing in what you do even when it does not bear visible fruit.
J.M. Coetzee
#10. I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life.
J.M. Coetzee
#11. Teaching was never a vocation for me. Certainly I never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be called a scholar. I wrote books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living.
J.M. Coetzee
#12. The mistake the two of us made,' I said, 'was that we skimped the foreplay. I'm not blaming you, it was as much my fault as yours, but it was a fault nonetheless.
J.M. Coetzee
#13. For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology.
J.M. Coetzee
#14. He believed that our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish,within or even against the constraints posed by the real world ...
J.M. Coetzee
#15. We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?
J.M. Coetzee
#16. I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.
J.M. Coetzee
#17. Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.
J.M. Coetzee
#18. When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers?
J.M. Coetzee
#19. South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.
J.M. Coetzee
#20. I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
J.M. Coetzee
#21. Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.
J.M. Coetzee
#22. To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.
J.M. Coetzee
#23. Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
J.M. Coetzee
#24. The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear the ground for them. Clearing ground an piling stones is little enough, but it is better than sitting in idleness.
J.M. Coetzee
#25. When death cuts all other links, there remains the name. Baptism: the union of a soul with a name, the name it will carry into eternity.
J.M. Coetzee
#26. I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
J.M. Coetzee
#27. This is what it leads to! This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for a moment!
J.M. Coetzee
#28. I hope that in the afterlife we will get a chance, each of us, to say our sorries to the people we have wronged.
J.M. Coetzee
#29. And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
J.M. Coetzee
#30. But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?
J.M. Coetzee
#31. I read a great deal as a child. A lot of children go through a phase of reading in a literally voracious way. It is their primary imaginative activity. Maybe that's an experience which is not so common any more with the presence of television in every home.
J.M. Coetzee
#33. Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.
J.M. Coetzee
#34. Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
J.M. Coetzee
#35. And you trust yourself to divine that, from the words I use - to divine whether it comes from my heart?
J.M. Coetzee
#36. In Coetzee's eyes, we human beings will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient and too attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions.
J.M. Coetzee
#37. I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind?
J.M. Coetzee
#38. He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.
J.M. Coetzee
#39. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.
J.M. Coetzee
#40. Charakter ist Schicksal. Historie ist Gott.
J.M. Coetzee
#41. Truly, the world ought to belong to the singers and dancers!
J.M. Coetzee
#42. Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
J.M. Coetzee
#43. I should never have allowed the gates of the town to be opened to people who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency.
J.M. Coetzee
#44. It's admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.
J.M. Coetzee
#45. If you were blind you would hardly have fallen in love in the first place. But now, do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold clarity of the visual apparatus? It may be in your better interest to throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form.
J.M. Coetzee
#46. What does he know of the force that drives the utmost strangers into each other's arms, making them kin, kind, beyond all prudence?
J.M. Coetzee
#47. In a while the organism will repair itself, and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again. But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float toward his end.
J.M. Coetzee
#48. Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.
J.M. Coetzee
#49. Is this love - this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?
J.M. Coetzee
#50. I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them.
J.M. Coetzee
#51. The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard.
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
#52. The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty.
J.M. Coetzee
#53. In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.
J.M. Coetzee
#54. For I am no orator. What would I have said if they had let me go on? That it is worse to beat a man's feet to pulp than to kill him in combat? That it brings shame on everyone when a girl is permitted to flog a man? That spectacles of cruelty corrupt the hearts of the innocent?
J.M. Coetzee
#55. Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
J.M. Coetzee
#57. The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
J.M. Coetzee
#58. The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
J.M. Coetzee
#59. ...she prefers to think in similitudes rather than reason things out...
J.M. Coetzee
#60. What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out.
J.M. Coetzee
#61. So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?
J.M. Coetzee
#62. ... but what do slow and fast matter any more?
J.M. Coetzee
#63. I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.
J.M. Coetzee
#64. Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?
J.M. Coetzee
#66. Freud's warning that what I omit without thinking (i.e. without conscious thought) may be the key to the deepest truth about me?
J.M. Coetzee
#67. Yet we cannot live our daily lives in a realm of pure ideas, cocooned from sense-experience. The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist?
J.M. Coetzee
#68. Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.
J.M. Coetzee
#69. It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from 'the wise man's mouth' but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.
J.M. Coetzee
#70. There is a cold war on the go. America and Russia are competing for the hearts and minds of Indians, Iraquies, Nigerians; scholarships to universities are among the inducements they offer.
J.M. Coetzee
#71. To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.
J.M. Coetzee
#72. Stiff shoulders humped over the writing-table, and the ache of a heart slow to move. A tortoise heart.
J.M. Coetzee
#73. All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
J.M. Coetzee
#74. You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.
J.M. Coetzee
#75. Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?
J.M. Coetzee
#76. There is nothing more inimical to writing than the spirit of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism abhors the play of signs, the endlessness of writing. Fundamentalism means nothing more or less than going back to an origin and staying there. It stands for one founding book and, thereafter, no more books.
J.M. Coetzee
#77. Islamic fundamentalism in its activist manifestation is bad news. Religious fundamentalism in general is bad news. We know about religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Calvinist fundamentalism has been an unmitigated force of benightedness in our history.
J.M. Coetzee
#78. How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid?
J.M. Coetzee
#79. All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
J.M. Coetzee
#80. Flowers grow best on dungheaps, as Shakespeare never tires of saying.
J.M. Coetzee
#81. The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves," I say. I nod and nod, driving the message home. "Not on others," I say.
J.M. Coetzee
#82. I have a desire to be saved which I must call immoderate.
J.M. Coetzee
#83. I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the one least fitted to write a memorial. Better the blacksmith with his cries of rage and woe.
J.M. Coetzee
#84. You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we led of Cruso's island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day.
J.M. Coetzee
#85. Photographs is not the same as just name, is more living. Otherwise, why save photographs? (Marijana to Mr Rayment)
J.M. Coetzee
#86. Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin.
J.M. Coetzee
#88. We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
J.M. Coetzee
#89. 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.
J.M. Coetzee
#90. Can he find it in his heart to love this plain, ordinary woman? Can he love her enough to write a music for her? If he cannot, what is left for him?
J.M. Coetzee
#91. It is a world of words that creates a world of things.
J.M. Coetzee
#92. If there is ever a word of criticism of America, it is of the most muted kind.
J.M. Coetzee
#93. Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.
J.M. Coetzee
#94. Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
J.M. Coetzee
#95. If only we could eat our sunsets, I say, we would all be full.
J.M. Coetzee
#96. My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.
J.M. Coetzee
#97. I do not believe that any form of lasting community can exist where people do not share the same sense of what is just and what is not just.
J.M. Coetzee
#98. All that I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to the grave by old friends.
J.M. Coetzee
#99. Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?
J.M. Coetzee
#100. Children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don't see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.
J.M. Coetzee
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