J. M. Coetzee Quotes

There seemed nothing to do but live.

I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves.

No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice).

The company of women made of him a lover of women and, to a certain extent, a womanizer."

One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men.”

For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology.

"He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).

To live in silence is to live like the whales.

You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we lead on Cruso’s island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day.

Francis had always protected me. It was his instinct. He saw the vulnerability, understood it all too well. But in that final moment in Desirea's, he had tried to protect another. When a cop with his hand on his holstered gun grabbed Jelly and tried to pull him away, Francis had panicked. "Don't touch him," he'd said, reaching to still the weapon. It was a gesture with history, but unreadable by those around him holding power. The authorities had investigated, interviewed witnesses, pronounced their conclusions. "They called it lawful," I told Aisha. And what else could we do but each look away?

The activity of writing, then, is not to be distinguished from the activity of self-exploration. It consists in contemplating the sea of internal images, discerning connections, and setting these out in grammatical sentences (“I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences,” says Murnane, whose views on grammar are firm, even pedantic.)

Truly, man was not made to live alone!

لا أستطيع أن أعبر لك عن مدى إرهاقى.
ليس إرهاقاً يمكن علاجه بالنوم ليلة هادئة فى سرير حقيقى، الإرهاق الذى أقصده صار جزءاً منى.يشبه الصبغة التى تتسرب إلى كل ما أفعله، وكل ما أقوله، أشعر، بتعبير هوميروس، أننى مرخية الأوتار، لم تعد هناك قوة شد.
ارتخى وتر القوس الذى اعتاد أن يكون مشدوداً، صار مثل جديلة من القطن، وهذا ليس حال الجسد فقط. العقل أيضاً : مرتخ، مستعد لنوم هادئ.

Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.