QUOTES by J. M. Coetzee
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"He does not know what freedom is. Freedom is a word, less than a word, a noise, one of the multitude of noises I make when I open my mouth."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?"
Quote by -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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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)."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.” “I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"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."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee
"The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do."
Quote by -J. M. Coetzee