#Quote
More Quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.
I am not the we of anyone.
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
