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More Quotes 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.
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.
Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
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.
Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
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.
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.
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.
