Top 160 J. M. Coetzee Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?”

— J. M. Coetzee

52. “The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.”

— J. M. Coetzee

53. “There seemed nothing to do but live.”

— J. M. Coetzee

54. “I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind?”

— J. M. Coetzee

55. “We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself!”

— J. M. Coetzee

56. “I said to myself, ‘If you don’t sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?’”

— J. M. Coetzee

57. “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

58. “There is no lie that does not have at its core some truth. One must only know how to listen.”

— J. M. Coetzee

59. “Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence. Yet why these glorious sunsets, I ask myself, if nature does not speak to us with tongues of fire.”

— J. M. Coetzee

60. “I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.”

— J. M. Coetzee

61. “Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.”

— J. M. Coetzee

62. “The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.”

— J. M. Coetzee

63. “The spark of true poetry flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together.”

— J. M. Coetzee

64. “Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier.”

— J. M. Coetzee

65. “Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?”

— J. M. Coetzee

66. “There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.”

— J. M. Coetzee

67. “A fool in love is laughed at but in the end always forgiven.”

— J. M. Coetzee

68. “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.”

— J. M. Coetzee

69. “Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.”

— J. M. Coetzee

70. “Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.”

— J. M. Coetzee

71. “The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.”

— J. M. Coetzee

72. “You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.”

— J. M. Coetzee

73. “Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin.”

— J. M. Coetzee

74. “I behave in some ways like a lover – I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her – but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.”

— J. M. Coetzee

75. “It’s that I no longer seem to know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses they have bought for money.”

— J. M. Coetzee

76. “I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.”

— J. M. Coetzee

77. “I remember asking John, after Dusklands, what new project he had on the go. His answer was vague. ‘There is always something or the other I am working on’, he said. ‘If I yield to the seduction of not working, what would I do with myself? What would there be to live for? I would have to shoot myself.”

— J. M. Coetzee

78. “I tell myself I talk to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use the words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will. At such times I understand why Cruso preferred not to disturb his muteness. I understand, that is to say, why a man will choose to be a slaveowner. Do you think less of me for this confession?”

— J. M. Coetzee

79. “I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.”

— J. M. Coetzee

80. “Kafka saw both himself and Red Peter as hybrids, as monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies.”

— J. M. Coetzee

81. “Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.”

— J. M. Coetzee

82. “When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers?”

— J. M. Coetzee

83. “Let me tell you the meaning of the sacred and alluring garden that blooms in the heart of the desert and produces the food of life. The garden for which you are currently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps. It is another name for the only place where you belong, Michaels, where you do not feel homeless. It is off every map, no road leads to it that is merely a road, and only you know the way.”

— J. M. Coetzee

84. “Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.”

— J. M. Coetzee

85. “Pain is nothing, just a warning signal from the body to the brain. Pain is no more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing. Biut of course he is wrong.”

— J. M. Coetzee

86. “Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might truly be himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can one know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure?”

— J. M. Coetzee

87. “In a while the organism will repair itself, and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again. But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float toward his end.”

— J. M. Coetzee

88. “My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.”

— J. M. Coetzee

89. “When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.”

— J. M. Coetzee

90. “Konkurrenz ist eine Sublimierung von Krieg.”

— J. M. Coetzee

91. “He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.”

— J. M. Coetzee

92. “The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.”

— J. M. Coetzee

93. “Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task.”

— J. M. Coetzee

94. “Teaching was never a vocation for me. Certainly I never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be called a scholar. I wrote books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living.”

— J. M. Coetzee

95. “The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.”

— J. M. Coetzee

96. “Yet we cannot live our daily lives in a realm of pure ideas, cocooned from sense-experience. The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist?”

— J. M. Coetzee

97. “All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I own proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world.”

— J. M. Coetzee

98. “The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.”

— J. M. Coetzee

99. “The question is not, are we sorry? The question is, what lesson have we learned? The question is what are we going to do now that we are sorry?”

— J. M. Coetzee

100. “Die Wahrheit wird nicht im Zorn gesprochen. Die Wahrheit, wenn sie denn gesprochen wird, wird im Geist der Liebe gesprochen.”

— J. M. Coetzee