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Authors:
J. M. Coetzee Quotes

J. M. Coetzee quotes about feeling

South african Author, Writer February 9, 1940

J. M. Coetzee quotes in russian
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Quotes

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
But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover—I undress her, I bathe... J. M. Coetzee
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 a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy... J. M. Coetzee
I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them. J. M. Coetzee
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. J. M. Coetzee
J. M. Coetzee quote: "The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would..."
The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role. J. M. Coetzee

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