More Quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.
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.
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.
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
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.
Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.
The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
