More Quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
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.
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.
You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.
Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.
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.
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.
