J. M. Coetzee Quotes

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

Always, there were stories on TV and in the papers of gangs, killings in bad neighborhoods, predators roaming close. One morning, I peered with Francis into a newspaper box to read a headline about the latest terror and caught in the glass the reflection of our own faces.

هناك ما أطلق عليهم الارضيين، أولئك الذىن يقفون وأقدامهم مغروسة فى الأرض التى ولدوا فيها، وهنالك الفراشات، مخلوقات الضوء والهواء، سكان مؤقتون، يحطون هنا وهناك ، تزعم أنك فراشة، تريد ان تكون فراشة، وذات يوم تقع وقعة مفجعة، تُصدم وتسقط على الأرض ، وحين تلتقط أنفاسك تجد انك لم تعد تستطيع الطيران مثل كائن أثيرى ولا تستطيع المشى، لست سوى كتلة من اللحم الجامد، إنه بالتأكيد درس واضح لا يمكن أن تغمض عينيك وتصم أذنيك أمامه .

But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies have their own signs. It is the home of Friday.

It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various ways.

Would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, he no longer knew for sure what truth, what fancy.

From the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?

He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades.

But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

Perhaps it does us good to have a fall every now and then. As long as we don't break.

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

Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.

Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.