Top 100 J M Coetzee Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About J M Coetzee

#1. I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

Amy Waldman

#2. The bestseller charts, a sure indicator of public taste, tell us with relentless frequency that Marian Keyes or Jeffrey Archer is a better author, by some dizzying six-figure sum, both in numbers of copies and money, than, say, J. M. Coetzee or Patrick White. Are they right?

Neel Mukherjee

#3. 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

#4. How easy it is to love a child, how hard to love what a child turns into!

J.M. Coetzee

#5. One must love what is nearest, one must love what is to hand, as a dog loves".

J.M. Coetzee

#6. 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

#7. I am not the we of anyone

J.M. Coetzee

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier.

J.M. Coetzee

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?

J.M. Coetzee

#21. 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

#22. Faith means believing in what you do even when it does not bear visible fruit.

J.M. Coetzee

#23. I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life.

J.M. Coetzee

#24. 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

#25. Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.

J.M. Coetzee

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology.

J.M. Coetzee

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. If you are not fully in the game you are playing, however, you are not truly playing it.

J.M. Coetzee

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. From the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?

J.M. Coetzee

#41. 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

#42. Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.

J.M. Coetzee

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. Kafka saw both himself and Red Peter as hybrids, as monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies.

J.M. Coetzee

#48. ...we are on the road from no A to no B in the world...

J.M. Coetzee

#49. 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

#50. I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

J.M. Coetzee

#51. This is what it leads to! This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for a moment!

J.M. Coetzee

#52. From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.

J.M. Coetzee

#53. There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas.

J.M. Coetzee

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

J.M. Coetzee

#59. And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant

J.M. Coetzee

#60. (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

#61. The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.

J.M. Coetzee

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. Reason is simply a vast tautology.

J.M. Coetzee

#71. When all else fails, philosophize.

J.M. Coetzee

#72. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths

J.M. Coetzee

#73. 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

#74. If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.

J.M. Coetzee

#75. 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

#76. Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

J.M. Coetzee

#77. And you trust yourself to divine that, from the words I use - to divine whether it comes from my heart?

J.M. Coetzee

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

J.M. Coetzee

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. Women are sensitive to it, to the weight of the desiring gaze.

J.M. Coetzee

#86. 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

#87. The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.

J.M. Coetzee

#88. I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

J.M. Coetzee

#89. Charakter ist Schicksal. Historie ist Gott.

J.M. Coetzee

#90. The sun's touch is kind.

J.M. Coetzee

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

J.M. Coetzee

#92. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I own proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world.

J.M. Coetzee

#93. I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.

J.M. Coetzee

#94. His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough(72).

J.M. Coetzee

#95. You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins."
"I'm going to end up in a hole in the ground ... And so are you. So are we all.

J.M. Coetzee