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Authors:
J. M. Coetzee Quotes

J. M. Coetzee quotes

South african Author, Writer February 9, 1940

J. M. Coetzee quotes in russian
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Quotes

Well, cast your mind back to the books he wrote. What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book? It is that the woman doesn’t fall in love with the man. The man may or may not love the woman; but the woman never loves the man. What do you think that theme reflects? My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn’t fall for him—not women in their right senses. They inspected him, maybe they even tried him our. Then they moved on. J. M. Coetzee
If there were a way of putting an end to himself by some purely mental act he would put an end to himself at once, without further ado. His mind is full of stories of people who bring about their end - who methodically pay bills, write goodbye notes, burn old love letters, label keys, and then, once everything is in order, don their Sunday best and swallow down pills they have hoarded for the occasion and settle themselves on their neatly made beds and compose features for oblivion. Heroes... J. M. Coetzee
Anyway, said Robert, they got a big fright. After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soap. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn't give a stuff for us. They just don't want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good. J. M. Coetzee
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
J. M. Coetzee quote: "I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them..."
I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best. J. M. Coetzee
J. M. Coetzee quote: "The Empire does not require that its servants love each other,..."
The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty. J. M. Coetzee
He would never want to diminish that event, that blow. It was nothing less than a calamity. It has shrunk his world, turned him into a prisoner. But escaping death ought to have shaken him up, opened windows inside him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before , only greyer and drearier. Enough to drive one to drink. J. M. Coetzee
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. J. M. Coetzee
What is there left for me after my purgatory of solitude?...I welcome death as a version of life in which I will not be myself. There is a fallacy here which I ought to see but will not. For when I wake on the ocean floor it will be the same old voice that drones out of me... J. M. Coetzee
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... J. M. Coetzee
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
if Jesus had stooped to play politics he might have become a key man in Roman Judea, a big operator. It was because he was indifferent to politics, and made his indifference clear, that he was liquidated. How to live one's life outside politics, and one's death too: that was the example he set for his followers. J. M. Coetzee
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. J. M. Coetzee
...So that someone might want to put you in a book...So that you may be worth putting in a book...Live like a hero...Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for? J. M. Coetzee
The path that leads through Latin and alebra is not the path to material success. But it may suggest much more: that understanding things is a waste of time; that if you want to succeed in the world and have a happy family and a nice home and a BMW you should not try to understand things but just add up the numbers or press the buttons or do whatever else it is that marketers are so richly rewarded for doing J. M. Coetzee

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