More Quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
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.
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.
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.
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.
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.
I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.
