#Quote
More Quotes by J. M. Coetzee
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.
Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.
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.
I am not the we of anyone.
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.
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
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.
You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.
