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J. M. Coetzee
174 quotes
“The company of women made of him a lover of women and, to a certain extent, a womanizer.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why? Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Scandal. A pity that must be his theme, but he is in no state to improvise.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is how it begins.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... the whole thing is disgraceful from beginning to end. Disgraceful and vulgar.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Confessions, apologies: why this thirst for abasement? A hush falls. They circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It reminds me too much of Mao’s China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because he takes pleasure in her, because his pleasure is unfailing, an affection has grown up in him for her. To some degree, he believes, this affection is reciprocated. Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Note that we are not asked to condemn this being with the mad heart, this being with whom there is some thing constitutionally wrong.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don’t expect sympathy from me, David, and don’t expect sympathy from anyone else either. No sympathy, no mercy, not in this day and age. Everyone’s hand will be against you, and why not? Really, how could you”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m dubious, Lucy. It sounds suspiciously like community service. It sounds like someone trying to make reparation for past misdeeds.’”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My case rests on the rights of desire,’ he says. ‘On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.’”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Spoken without irony, the words stay with him and will not go away.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka—Poles, for the most part—said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in a general way they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet whole days pass in a fog of grey exhaustion. He curses himself for letting himself be sucked back into an affair that costs him so much. If this is what having a mistress entails, how do Picasso and the others get by? He simply has not the energy to run from lecture to lecture, job to job, then when the day is done to pay attention to a woman who veers between euphoria and spells of the blackest gloom in which she thrashes around brooding on a lifetime's grudges.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His refuge from IBM is the cinema. [...] He goes to the whole of an Antonioni season. In a film called L'Eclisse a woman wanders through the streets of a sunstruck, deserted city. She is disturbed, anguished. What she is anguished about he cannot quite define; her face reveals nothing. The woman is Monica Vitti. With her perfect legs and sensual lips and abstracted look, Monica Vitti haunts him. He falls in love with her. — Chapter 6, page 48.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At IBM he has to keep his fantasies of Monica Vitti to himself, and the rest of his arty pretensions too. [...] For reasons that are not clear to him, he has been adopted as a chum by a fellow programmer named Bill Briggs. [...] Whereas the other programmers speak with unplaceable grammar-school accents and start the day by flipping to the financial pages of the Telegraph to check the share prices, Bill Briggs has a marked London accent and stores his money in a building society account.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He does not as yet know England well enough to do England in prose. He is not even sure he can do the parts of London he is familiar with, the London of crowds trudging to work, of cold and rain, of bedsitters with curtainless windows and forty-watt bulbs. — Chapter 7, page 63.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once upon a time, when he was still an innocent child, he believed that cleverness was the only yardstick that mattered, that as long as he was clever enough he would attain everything he desired. Going to university put him in his place. The university showed him he was not the cleverest, not by a long chalk. — Chapter 8, page 65.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He does not see what the British have against the Russians. Britain and Russia have been on the same side in all the wars he knows of since 1854. The Russians have never threatened to invade Britain. Why then are the British siding with the Americans, who behave like bullies in Europe as all over the world? It is not as though the British actually like the Americans. — Chapter 10, page 83.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[...] he can see no reason why people need to dance. Dancing makes sense only when it is interpreted as something else, something that people prefer not to admit. That something else is the real thing: the dance is merely a cover. Inviting a girl to dance stands for inviting her to have intercourse; and dancing is a miming and foreshadowing of intercourse. So obvious are the correspondences that he wonders why people bother with dancing at all. Why the dressing up, why the ritual motions; why the huge sham? — Chapter 11, pages 89–90.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can anyone in England understand what brings people from the far corners of the earth to die on a wet, miserable island which they detest and to which they have no ties? — Chapter 18, page 148.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It continues to astound him that people can be as clever as people are in the computer industry, yet have no outside interests beyond cars and house prices. — Chapter 18, page 149.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He is here, with her, out of love. *He cannot imagine her getting through this trial without him at her side.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him…We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because Costello is his mother’s maiden name, and because he has never seen any reason to broadcast his connection with her, it was not known at the time of the invitation that Elizabeth Costello, the Australian writer, had a family connection in the Appleton community. He would have preferred that state of affairs to continue.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Norma and his mother have never liked each other. Probably his mother would have chosen not to like any woman he married.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His mother is entitled to her convictions, he believes. If she wants to spend her declining years making propaganda against cruelty to animals, that is her right.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She no longer believes very strongly in belief... Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Paul here is unhappy because unhappiness is second nature to him but more particularly because he has not the faintest idea of how to bring about his heart's desire. And I am unhappy because nothing is happening. Four people in four corners, moping, like tramps in Beckett, and myself in the middle, wasting time, being wasted by time.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why does love, even such love as he claims to practise, need the spectacle of beauty to bring it to life? What, in the abstract, do shapely legs have to do with love, or for that matter with desire? Or is that just the nature of nature, about which one does not ask questions?”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king’s firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So when you climbed, he said, you had to go careful. You had to watch your older brother and follow close his moves. You had to think back on every step before you took it. Remembering hard the whole way up. ... "And if you can’t memory right," he said, "you lose.”
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source