#Quote
More Quotes by J. M. Coetzee
I am not the we of anyone.
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.
Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.
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.
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.
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
