J.M. Coetzee

Quotes

• “Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look o...”
• “It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in de...”
• “How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, ...”
• “As you speak I swear I can hear words being selected, one after another, from the word-box you carry around with you, an...”
• “He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was o...”
• “Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say that at each moment...”
• “if Jesus had stooped to play politics he might have become a key man in Roman Judea, a big operator. It was because he w...”
• “The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another...”
• “Why has he taken this job?... For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and disho...”
• “In a while the organism will repair itself, and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again. But the truth, he kno...”
• “A risk to own anything : a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around. Not enough shoes, cars...”
• “The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lex...”
• “There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity...”
• “He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. He tries not to sentimentalize the animals he kills, or to sentimentalize Bev Sha...”
• “Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden o...”
• “The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but...”
• “Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be ...”
• “I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town ...”
• “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 ...”
• “I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geo...”
• “He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced t...”
• “Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear,...”
• “I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feel...”
• “In a minute, in an hour, it will be too late; whatever is happening to her will be set in stone, will belong to the past...”
• “You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my...”
• “In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken...”
• “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 t...”
• “Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aur...”
• “What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to f...”
• “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 d...”
• “What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warni...”
• “It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtim...”
• “I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled a...”
• “Die Wahrheit wird nicht im Zorn gesprochen. Die Wahrheit, wenn sie denn gesprochen wird, wird im Geist der Liebe gesproc...”
• “Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for...”
• “Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.”
• “There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.”
• “Is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing place of memories?”
• “Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.”
• “A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.”
• “A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.”
• “Asymmetrie [macht] Menschen unglücklich.”