Coetzee's Quotes
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Coetzee's Quotes & Sayings
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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 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
This is what it leads to! This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for a moment!
— J.M. Coetzee
We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself!
— J.M. Coetzee
How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?
— J.M. Coetzee
We are not by nature cruel.
— 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
One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.
— 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
I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.
— 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
There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.
— J.M. Coetzee
There seemed nothing to do but live.
— J.M. Coetzee
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
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
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
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
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
Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
— 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
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
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
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
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
In the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself.
— 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
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
Jokes, secrets, complicities; a glance here, a word there: that is their way of being together, of being apart.
— 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
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
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
