Coetzee Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Coetzee

Coetzee Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Coetzee quotes, sayings and quotations 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?' — J.M. Coetzee

Nothing is worse than what we can imagine — J.M. Coetzee

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

Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier. — J.M. Coetzee

Is this love - this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend? — J.M. Coetzee

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

From the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement? — J.M. Coetzee

The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

The sun is setting, the sky is a tumult of oranges, reds and violets. — J.M. Coetzee

How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate? — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

We are not by nature cruel. — J.M. Coetzee

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

This is what it leads to! This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for a moment! — 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. — J.M. Coetzee

We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! — J.M. Coetzee

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

A fool in love is laughed at but in the end always forgiven — J.M. Coetzee

Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

It is a world of words that creates a world of things. — J.M. Coetzee

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

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other. — J.M. Coetzee

Flowers grow best on dungheaps, as Shakespeare never tires of saying. — J.M. Coetzee

There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason. — J.M. Coetzee

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

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice. — J.M. Coetzee

Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it. — J.M. Coetzee

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization. — 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. — J.M. Coetzee

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

The sun's touch is kind. — 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. — J.M. Coetzee

Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

There seemed nothing to do but live. — J.M. Coetzee

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

I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world. — J.M. Coetzee

All is allegory ... Each creature is key to all other creatures. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

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

I have a desire to be saved which I must call immoderate. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

Photographs is not the same as just name, is more living. Otherwise, why save photographs? (Marijana to Mr Rayment) — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

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

When all else fails, philosophize. — J.M. Coetzee

And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant — J.M. Coetzee

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

I am not the we of anyone — J.M. Coetzee

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

Is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing place of memories? — J.M. Coetzee

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

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

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

Women are sensitive to it, to the weight of the desiring gaze. — J.M. Coetzee

The barbarians come out at night. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness. — J.M. Coetzee

Reason is simply a vast tautology. — J.M. Coetzee

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

Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present? — 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. — J.M. Coetzee

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

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us. — J.M. Coetzee

In the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself. — 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. — J.M. Coetzee

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

Long visits don't make for good friends. — J.M. Coetzee

Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

The jackal rips out the hare's bowels, but the world rolls on. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

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

...she prefers to think in similitudes rather than reason things out... — J.M. Coetzee

The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard.
Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. — J.M. Coetzee

If you are not fully in the game you are playing, however, you are not truly playing it. — J.M. Coetzee

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography. — J.M. Coetzee

Two names on the page, his and hers, side by side. Two in a bed, lovers no longer but foes. — J.M. Coetzee

Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin. — J.M. Coetzee

If only we could eat our sunsets, I say, we would all be full. — J.M. Coetzee

Unbelief is a belief. — J.M. Coetzee

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

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

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

How easy it is to love a child, how hard to love what a child turns into! — J.M. Coetzee