J. M. Coetzee Quotes

My case rests on the rights of desire,’ he says. ‘On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.’

Can we visit it soon? Aisha asks. It's supposed to be warm this weekend. [...] What do you say? Aisha presses. The pathway down should be clear enough to get close to the creek. We'll be sure to go slow, Ruth. Maybe we could borrow a wheelchair. Jelly? Are you in?

He believed that our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish,within or even against the constraints posed by the real world...

What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out.

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.

There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.

Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths

We had been stopped by the cops before. There was a routine to it all: we knew that if you carefully played along you’d eventually be released, if not with your dignity, then at least with your skin. But that night we sensed an urgency we hadn’t experienced before. With the blinding headlights upon me, I couldn’t process the commands.

Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.

At last I could row no further.

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 bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong

He could not imagine ... driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land

His mother is entitled to her convictions, he believes. If she wants to spend her declining years making propaganda against cruelty to animals, that is her right.

Not only may you not enter the state without certification: you are, in the eyes of the state, not dead until you are certified dead; and you can be certified dead only by an officer who himself (herself) holds state certification. The state pursues the certification of death with extraordinary thoroughness — witness the dispatch of a host of forensic scientists and bureaucrats to scrutinize and photograph and prod and poke the mountain of human corpses left behind by the great tsunami of December 2004 in order to establish their individual identities. No expense is spared to ensure that the census of subjects shall be complete and accurate.

Whether the citizen lives or dies is not a concern of the state. What matters to the state and its records is whether the citizen is alive or dead.