#Quote
More Quotes 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.
I am not the we of anyone.
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
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.
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.
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.
Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
