J.M. Coetzee quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from J.M. Coetzee on Wise Famous Quotes.

I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'

The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

Is this love - this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?

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

The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.

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

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.

The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty.

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.

If i were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism

I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.

Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.

All is allegory ... Each creature is key to all other creatures.

When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.

I hope that in the afterlife we will get a chance, each of us, to say our sorries to the people we have wronged.

Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.

I have a desire to be saved which I must call immoderate.

Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

The sun's touch is kind.

We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself!

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

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.

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

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

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?

We are not by nature cruel.

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.

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

... but what do slow and fast matter any more?

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

The spark of true poetry flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together.

We can pretend that the book in question is not Mr. West's but mine, made mine by the madness of my reading.

What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?

Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.

What does he know of the force that drives the utmost strangers into each other's arms, making them kin, kind, beyond all prudence?

Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.

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.

Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths

Truly, the world ought to belong to the singers and dancers!

Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.

He knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.

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

I am now no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy.

Charakter ist Schicksal. Historie ist Gott.

[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

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

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

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

Stiff shoulders humped over the writing-table, and the ache of a heart slow to move. A tortoise heart.

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

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

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?

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

Freud's warning that what I omit without thinking (i.e. without conscious thought) may be the key to the deepest truth about me?

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

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

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.

I am not the we of anyone

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

Is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing place of memories?

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

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.

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.

If there is ever a word of criticism of America, it is of the most muted kind.

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

The barbarians come out at night.

Perhaps it does us good to have a fall every now and then. As long as we don't break.

I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.

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

Reason is simply a vast tautology.

Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?

To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

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

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

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

It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various ways.

A fool in love is laughed at but in the end always forgiven

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

I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

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

Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.

Flowers grow best on dungheaps, as Shakespeare never tires of saying.

The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard.
Disgrace

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

Long visits don't make for good friends.

One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.

The jackal rips out the hare's bowels, but the world rolls on.

I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.

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.

Jokes, secrets, complicities; a glance here, a word there: that is their way of being together, of being apart.

...she prefers to think in similitudes rather than reason things out...

In the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself.

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

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin.

If only we could eat our sunsets, I say, we would all be full.

Unbelief is a belief.