#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.
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.
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.
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.
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
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.
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
