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J. M. Coetzee
174 quotes
“Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Erasmus’s Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness,” Neophilologus 76 (1992), p. 1
“It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry,” Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), p. 94
“[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.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dagens Nyheter interview with David Attwell (December 8, 2003)
“As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dagens Nyheter interview with David Attwell (December 8, 2003)
“A dictum [Beckett] quotes from his favourite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) suggests his overall stance toward the political: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don’t invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Making of Samuel Beckett,” New York Review of Books, vol. LVI, no. 7 (April 30, 2009), p. 13
“Light in tone, the novel [Murphy] is Beckett’s response to the therapeutic orthodoxy that the patient should learn to engage with the larger world on the world’s terms.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Making of Samuel Beckett,” New York Review of Books, vol. LVI, no. 7 (April 30, 2009), p. 14
“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.)”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The quest for the girl from Bendigo Street,” The New York Review of Books, v. 59. n. 20, December 20, 2012
“The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of a dependent people, I was opposed to civilization...”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Will we live to regret this blood spent so lavishly on the sand?”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Truly the world should belong to singers and dancers.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Truly, man was not made to live alone!”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can I accept that disaster has overtaken my life when the world continues to move so tranquilly through its cycles?”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But more often in the very act of caressing her I am overcome with sleep as if polelaxed, fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body, and wake an hour or two later dizzy, confused, thirsty. These dreamless spells are like death to me, or enchantment, black, outside time.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have been here more than a hundred years, we have reclaimed land from the desert and built irrigation works and planted fields and built solid homes and put a wall around our town, but they still think of us as visitors, transients.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman’s body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There seemed nothing to do but live.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do any of us believe in what we are doing here? I doubt it. Her NCO husband least of all. We are given an old racetrack and a quantity of barbed wire and told to effect a change in men's souls. Not being experts on the soul but assuming cautiously that it has some connection with the body, we set our captives to doing pushups and marching back and forth.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of war. An unbearing, unborn creature.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You want to stop on the expressway, you pull fifty metres off the roadside...Anything nearer, you can get shot, no warning, no questions asked.'”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps, [Michael] thought, it was better when one did not have to rely on other people”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Michael K sat ... watching his mother polish other people's floors, learning to be quiet.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If she was going to die, she would at least die under blue skies”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Though he had no more business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we've got here?”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He could not imagine ... driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can't you tell the difference between a thin man and a skeleton?”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As time passed, however, I slowly began to see the originality of the resistance you offered”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I discovered out in the country ... that there is time enough for everything”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At last I could row no further. My hands were blistered, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard. With slow strokes, my long hair floating about me, like a flower of the sea, like an anemone, like a jellyfish of the kind you see in the waters of Brazil, I swam towards the strange island, for a while swimming as I had rowed, against the current, then all at once free of its grip, carried by the waves into the bay and on to the beach.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place: a great rocky hill with a flat top, rising sharply from the sea on all sides except one, dotted with drab bushes that never flowered and never shed their leaves.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Crushed under his soles whole clusters of the thorns that had pierced my skin.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of).”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source