J. M. Coetzee Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

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

J. M. Coetzee
Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.

J. M. Coetzee
When we dream that we are dreaming, the moment of awakening is at hand.

J. M. Coetzee
The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard.

J. M. Coetzee
I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

J. M. Coetzee
All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

J. M. Coetzee
And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant

J. M. Coetzee
The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.

J. M. Coetzee
From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.

J. M. Coetzee
If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.

J. M. Coetzee
The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.

J. M. Coetzee
But truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love.

J. M. Coetzee
He thought of himself as a termite boring its way through a rock. There seemed nothing to do but live.

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

J. M. Coetzee
If we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

J. M. Coetzee
Talking to Petrus is like punching a bag of sand.
'Are you giving him up?'
'Yes, I am giving him up.'

J. M. Coetzee
Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.

J. M. Coetzee
When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.

J. M. Coetzee
I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

J. M. Coetzee
Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.

J. M. Coetzee
One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.

J. M. Coetzee
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

J. M. Coetzee
I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.

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

J. M. Coetzee
Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.

J. M. Coetzee
The boy is special, Aunt Annie told his mother, and his mother in turn told him. But what kind of special? No one ever says.

J. M. Coetzee
Being a father... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.

J. M. Coetzee
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

J. M. Coetzee
In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.

J. M. Coetzee