J.M. Coetzee > Quotes

“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

“When all else fails, philosophize.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

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

“(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, Disgrace

“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, Slow Man

“A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Summertime

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

“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“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, Disgrace

“Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“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, Disgrace

“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, Disgrace

“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, The Lives of Animals

“Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Summertime

“Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“I am not the we of anyone”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.”
― J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“You think you know what is just and what is not. I understand. We all think we know." I had no doubt, myself, then, that at each moment each one of us, man, woman, child, perhaps even the poor old horse turning the mill-wheel, knew what was just: all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice. "But we live in a world of laws," I said to my poor prisoner, "a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade.”
― J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“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, Disgrace

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

“Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“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, Waiting for the Barbarians

“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”
― J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals

“Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Summertime