Top 100 Coetzee's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
J.M. Coetzee
#3. 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
#4. If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like.
J.M. Coetzee
#5. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths
J.M. Coetzee
#8. Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.
J.M. Coetzee
#9. 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
#10. There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.
J.M. Coetzee
#11. Fate deals you a hand, and you play the hand you are dealt. You do not whine, you do not complain. That, he used to believe, was his philosophy. Why then can he not resist these plunges into darkness?
J.M. Coetzee
#12. 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
#13. Out of all the fighters that I have developed, clothed, financed, Gerrie Coetzee is the only one who had the decency to say 'thanks'.
Don King
#14. Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.
J.M. Coetzee
#15. He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. He tries not to sentimentalize the animals he kills, or to sentimentalize Bev Shaw. He avoids saying to her 'I don't know how you do it,' in order not to have to hear her say in return, 'Someone has to do it.
J.M. Coetzee
#16. What is there left for me after my purgatory of solitude? ... I welcome death as a version of life in which I will not be myself. There is a fallacy here which I ought to see but will not. For when I wake on the ocean floor it will be the same old voice that drones out of me ...
J.M. Coetzee
#17. The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.
J.M. Coetzee
#18. (I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.
J.M. Coetzee
#19. And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
J.M. Coetzee
#20. If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
J.M. Coetzee
#21. 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
#22. What if...what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it: perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?
J.M. Coetzee
#23. 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.
J.M. Coetzee
#24. Pain is nothing, just a warning signal from the body to the brain. Pain is no more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing. Biut of course he is wrong.
J.M. Coetzee
#25. There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas.
J.M. Coetzee
#26. From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.
J.M. Coetzee
#27. 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
#28. The jackal rips out the hare's bowels, but the world rolls on.
J.M. Coetzee
#29. Artists no longer starve in garrets. Some people may think this is not wholly a good thing, that being an artist has become too comfortable, at least in the West. I'm not sure I agree. It's a mark of civilization to encourage the arts and the life of the mind.
J.M. Coetzee
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. We can pretend that the book in question is not Mr. West's but mine, made mine by the madness of my reading.
J.M. Coetzee
#34. 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
#35. I said last week that the number on Jean's back does not matter. He stays effective as a runner, decision-maker and leader.
Allister Coetzee
#36. There's nothing special about you,' said the man. 'There's nothing special about any of us.' His gesture embraced them all: prisoners, guards, foremen.
J.M. Coetzee
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. In becoming a citizen, one undertakes certain duties and responsibilities. One of the more intangible of those duties and responsibilities is no matter what one's birth and background, to accept the historical past of the new country as one's own.
J.M. Coetzee
#40. This is what it leads to! This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for a moment!
J.M. Coetzee
#41. 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
#43. Women are sensitive to it, to the weight of the desiring gaze.
J.M. Coetzee
#44. Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.
J.M. Coetzee
#45. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians ... These dreams are the consequence of too much ease. Show me the barbarian army and I will believe.
J.M. Coetzee
#46. The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.
J.M. Coetzee
#47. Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
J.M. Coetzee
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. And you trust yourself to divine that, from the words I use - to divine whether it comes from my heart?
J.M. Coetzee
#51. Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
J.M. Coetzee
#52. The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.
J.M. Coetzee
#53. 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
#54. Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.
J.M. Coetzee
#55. 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
#56. I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life.
J.M. Coetzee
#57. Faith means believing in what you do even when it does not bear visible fruit.
J.M. Coetzee
#58. She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.
J.M. Coetzee
#59. How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?
J.M. Coetzee
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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.
J.M. Coetzee
#65. For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.
J.M. Coetzee
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.
J.M. Coetzee
#69. Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier.
J.M. Coetzee
#70. Yet is it not the heart but the members of play that elevate us above the beasts: the fingers with which we touch the clavichord or the flute, the tongue with which we jest and lie and seduce. Lacking members of play, what is there left for beasts to do when they are bored but sleep?
J.M. Coetzee
#71. Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.
J.M. Coetzee
#73. 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
#74. One must love what is nearest, one must love what is to hand, as a dog loves".
J.M. Coetzee
#75. How easy it is to love a child, how hard to love what a child turns into!
J.M. Coetzee
#76. Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.
J.M. Coetzee
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. ...we are on the road from no A to no B in the world...
J.M. Coetzee
#80. Kafka saw both himself and Red Peter as hybrids, as monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies.
J.M. Coetzee
#81. 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
#82. I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.
Lynne Tillman
#83. 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
#84. Jokes have a relation to the unconscious.'
'Jokes may indeed have a relation to the unconscious. But also: sometimes a joke is just a joke.'
'Directed against-'
'Directed against you. Whom else? The man who doesn't laugh. The man who can't take a joke.
J.M. Coetzee
#85. 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
#86. Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.
J.M. Coetzee
#87. I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one's bones.
J.M. Coetzee
#88. From the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?
J.M. Coetzee
#89. I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
J.M. Coetzee
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
J.M. Coetzee
#93. My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.
J.M. Coetzee
#94. 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
#95. If you are not fully in the game you are playing, however, you are not truly playing it.
J.M. Coetzee
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology.
J.M. Coetzee
#100. It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.
J.M. Coetzee
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