J. M. Coetzee Quotes - Page 4

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Animals Children Consciousness Corruption Creation Desire Doubt

Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?

J. M. Coetzee

Lying, Two, Desire

J. M. Coetzee (2005). “Slow Man”, Viking Press

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What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded--God knows how--in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

J. M. Coetzee

Past, Giving, Locks

J M Coetzee (2015). “Elizabeth Costello”, p.38, Random House

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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 clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72).

J. M. Coetzee

Mind, Doe, Care

J M Coetzee (2015). “Disgrace”, p.72, Random House

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In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.

J. M. Coetzee

Heart, Order, Suffering

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She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.

J. M. Coetzee

Sweet, Giving, Mad

J. M. Coetzee (1999). “Disgrâce”, Random House (UK)

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If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.

J. M. Coetzee

Shells, Creation, Let Me

"Elizabeth Costello". Book by J. M. Coetzee, 2003.

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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. What I was determined to avoid was emotional entanglement. A passing fling was one thing, an affair of the heart quite another. Of myself I was fairly sure. I was not about to lose my heart to a man about whom I knew next to nothing.

J. M. Coetzee

Heart, Men, Emotional

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Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.

J. M. Coetzee

Ambition, Self, Political

"Erasmus's Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness". Neophilologus Journal, 1992.

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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

Home, Humility, Doe

J. M. Coetzee (1999). “Disgrâce”, Random House (UK)

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To me, a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether you have a white or a black skin, and a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether or not you know the difference between a subject and a predicate, are more alike than they are unlike.

J. M. Coetzee

Animal, White, Differences

J M Coetzee (2015). “Elizabeth Costello”, p.111, Random House

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Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.

J. M. Coetzee

Philosophy, Two, Skulls

J. M. Coetzee (1999). “Disgrâce”, Random House (UK)

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As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day.

J. M. Coetzee

July, People, September 11

Interview with David Attwell, www.dn.se. December 8, 2003.

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Despair ... 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

Despair, Relax, Steel

J. M. Coetzee (1999). “Disgrâce”, Random House (UK)

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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

Believe, Hysteria, World

J. M. Coetzee (2017). “Waiting for the Barbarians: A Novel”, p.94, Penguin

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No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice).

J. M. Coetzee

Lying, Angel, Made Up Stories

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In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.

J. M. Coetzee

Sage, Literature, Occupation

Interview with David Attwell, www.dn.se. December 8, 2003.

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If you were blind you would hardly have fallen in love in the first place. But now, do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold clarity of the visual apparatus? It may be in your better interest to throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form.

J. M. Coetzee

Wish, Alive, May

J. M. Coetzee (1999). “Disgrâce”, Random House (UK)

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My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.

J. M. Coetzee

Trying, Dubious, Answers

Interview with David Attwell, www.dn.se. December 8, 2003.

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State censorship presents itself as a bulwark between society and forces of subversion or moral corruption. To dismiss this account of its own motives by the state as insincere would be a mistake: it is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue ... must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice.

J. M. Coetzee

Mistake, Vices, Moral Corruption

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[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.

J. M. Coetzee

Outstanding

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I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.

J. M. Coetzee

Writing, Thinking, Style

Interview With David Attwell, www.dn.se. August 12, 2008.

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

J. M. Coetzee

Time, One Day, Machines

J. M. Coetzee (2017). “In the Heart of the Country: A Novel”, p.7, Penguin

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...the program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week...If I as a human being were told that the standards by which animals are being measured in these experiments are human standards, I would be insulted.

J. M. Coetzee

Animal, Mazes, Would Be

J M Coetzee (2015). “Elizabeth Costello”, p.108, Random House

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

J. M. Coetzee

Beauty, Ideas, Roles

Interview with David Attwell, www.dn.se. December 8, 2003.

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My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.

J. M. Coetzee

Eye, Thinking, Matter

J. M. Coetzee (1990). “Age of Iron”, Random House Inc

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Born: February 9, 1940
Occupation: Novelist
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