Best J M Coetzee Sayings
- A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us. Axe
- 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… All
- 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… Brings
- Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. Alienate
- I am not the we of anyone Anyone
- Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation. Annihilation
- Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined. Funny
- But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does… Annihilation
- 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… Admirable
- For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient… Beat
- His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises… Care
- He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an… Africa
- Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt. All
- When all else fails, philosophize. All
- I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best. All
- 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… Beings
- Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and… Action
- 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… All
- Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has… Certain
- In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for… Another Voice
- (I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution. Collaboration
- Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences. Consequence
- Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization. Barbarian
- We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable. All
- That was our first time together. Interesting, an interesting experience, but not earth-shaking. But then, I never expected it to be earth-shaking, not with him.… Affair