QUOTES by J. M. Coetzee
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"Do you think what happened here was an exam: if you come through, you get a diploma and safe conduct into the future, or a sign to paint on the door-lintel that will make the plague pass you by?"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"He believed that our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish,within or even against the constraints posed by the real world..."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"How easy it is to love a child, how hard to love what a child turns into!"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Is this love - this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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?"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Jokes, secrets, complicities; a glance here, a word there: that is their way of being together, of being apart."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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?"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Truth is not spoken in anger.Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"This is what it leads to! This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for a moment!"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various ways."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"...from the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"...So that someone might want to put you in a book...So that you may be worth putting in a book...Live like a hero...Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Perhaps it does us good to have a fall every now and then. As long as we don't break."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"If i were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard." --Disgrace"
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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)."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee