J. M. Coetzee Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.”
-- J. M. CoetzeeSource : "Disgrace". Book by J. M. Coetzee, 2000.
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“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything 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. CoetzeeSource : J. M. Coetzee (2016). “The Lives of Animals: The Lives of Animals [Princeton Classics]”, p.21, Princeton University Press
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“When all else fails, philosophize.”
-- J. M. CoetzeeSource : J. M. Coetzee (1999). “Disgrâce”, Random House (UK)
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“But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?”
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“We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.”
-- J. M. CoetzeeSource : J. M. Coetzee (2017). “Foe: A Novel”, p.98, Penguin
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“From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.”
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“A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.”
-- J. M. CoetzeeSource : J.M. Coetzee (2009). “Summertime”, p.61, Random House
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“Because a women'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. CoetzeeSource : J. M. Coetzee (1999). “Disgrâce”, Random House (UK)
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“The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.”
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“Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.”
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“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.”
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“Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?”
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“Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.”
-- J. M. CoetzeeSource : J. M. Coetzee (1980). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, Penguin Group USA
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“I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.”
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“I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.”
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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.”
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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.”
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“If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.”
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“In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.”
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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.”
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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. CoetzeeSource : J. M. Coetzee (2005). “Slow Man”, Viking Press
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“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. CoetzeeSource : "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
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“There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.”
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“The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.”
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“Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' ... he... felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness... like a gush of warm water... All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a tender of the soil.”
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“He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.”
-- J. M. Coetzee -
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“Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.”
-- J. M. Coetzee
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