Home > Author > J.M. Coetzee
41 " Is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing place of memories? "
― J.M. Coetzee , Foe
42 " In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story. "
― J.M. Coetzee
43 " I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones. "
44 " The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, in this time, it is not. It is my bussines, mine alone.'This place being what?''This place being South Africa "
― J.M. Coetzee , Disgrace
45 " I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the one least fitted to write a memorial. Better the blacksmith with his cries of rage and woe. "
― J.M. Coetzee , Waiting for the Barbarians
46 " A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us. "
― J.M. Coetzee , Summertime
47 " Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world... But there are other people to do these things - the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing, even the Byron thing. He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it. "
48 " What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again? "
― J.M. Coetzee , Youth
49 " There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason. "
― J.M. Coetzee , Elizabeth Costello
50 " I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean.We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment. "
― J.M. Coetzee , The Lives of Animals
51 " Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation. "
52 " The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction. Breaking into the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion. However, unless certain scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance. "
53 " Without desire how is it possible to make a story? "
54 " It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories. "
55 " Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him. "
― J.M. Coetzee , Slow Man
56 " No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness that we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished? "
57 " What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out. "
58 " Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity. "
59 " Moer and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth in South Africa. "
60 " Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He saw me—saw me as I was at that moment—took fright, hurriedly strapped the armour back over his heart, this time with chains and a double padlock, and stole out into the darkness. "