J. M. Coetzee Quotes

أمور مخيفة تجري في الليل، بينما أنت وأنا نائمين، الثعلب يسرق أحشاء الأرنب، ولكن العالم يستمر في الدوران

But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow.

[Being peppered with invitations to travel far and wide to give lectures] has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.

It would cost little to march them out into the desert . . . to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions.”

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.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

It reminds me too much of Mao’s China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology.

Will we live to regret this blood spent so lavishly on the sand?

Scandal. A pity that must be his theme, but he is in no state to improvise.

Spoken without irony, the words stay with him and will not go away.

he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.

Fate deals you a hand, and you play the hand you are dealt. You do not whine, you do not complain. That, he used to believe, was his philosophy. Why then can he not resist these plunges into darkness?

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

But two and two do equal four. Unless you give some strange, special meaning to equal. You can count it off for yourself: one two three four. If two and two really equalled three then everything would collapse into chaos. We would be in another universe, with other physical laws. In the existing universe two and two equal four. It is a universal rule, independent of us, not man-made at all. Even if you and I were to cease to be, two and two would go on equalling four.

Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.