More Quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
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.
If we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.
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.
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’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
