Top 160 J. M. Coetzee Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The sun’s touch is kind.”

— J. M. Coetzee

102. “Geschichte lebt nicht, wenn man ihr keine Heimat im Bewusstsein gibt; sie ist eine Last, die kein freier Mensch zu tragen gezwungen werden kann.”

— J. M. Coetzee

103. “As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day.”

— J. M. Coetzee

104. “Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?”

— J. M. Coetzee

105. “Do I believe in helping people? he wondered. He might help people, he might not help them, he did not know beforehand, anything was possible. He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help. Perhaps I am the stony ground, he thought.”

— J. M. Coetzee

106. “Well, cast your mind back to the books he wrote. What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book? It is that the woman doesn’t fall in love with the man. The man may or may not love the woman; but the woman never loves the man. What do you think that theme reflects? My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn’t fall for him – not women in their right senses. They inspected him, maybe they even tried him our. Then they moved on.”

— J. M. Coetzee

107. “Fate deals you a hand, and you play the hand you are dealt. You do not whine, you do not complain. That, he used to believe, was his philosophy. Why then can he not resist these plunges into darkness?”

— J. M. Coetzee

108. “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.”

— J. M. Coetzee

109. “He would never want to diminish that event, that blow. It was nothing less than a calamity. It has shrunk his world, turned him into a prisoner. But escaping death ought to have shaken him up, opened windows inside him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before, only greyer and drearier. Enough to drive one to drink.”

— J. M. Coetzee

110. “Imagine: to be prepared to yield, to yield, to have nothing more to yield, to be broken, yet to be pressed to yield more!”

— J. M. Coetzee

111. “Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.”

— J. M. Coetzee

112. “It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.”

— J. M. Coetzee

113. “Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn’t change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.”

— J. M. Coetzee

114. “One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.”

— J. M. Coetzee

115. “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?”

— J. M. Coetzee

116. “The mistake the two of us made,’ I said, ’was that we skimped the foreplay. I’m not blaming you, it was as much my fault as yours, but it was a fault nonetheless.”

— J. M. Coetzee

117. “Maybe. But in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.’ Like falling in love. Do the young still fall in love, or is that mechanism obsolete by now, unnecessary, quaint, like steam locomotion? He is out of touch, out of date. Falling in love could have fallen out of fashion and come back again half a dozen times, for all he knows.”

— J. M. Coetzee

118. “That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.”

— J. M. Coetzee

119. “If it is indeed impossible – or at least very difficult – to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.”

— J. M. Coetzee

120. “She is no longer sure that people are always improved by what they read. Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed.”

— J. M. Coetzee

121. “You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we led of Cruso’s island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day.”

— J. M. Coetzee

122. “Can he find it in his heart to love this plain, ordinary woman? Can he love her enough to write a music for her? If he cannot, what is left for him?”

— J. M. Coetzee

123. “I stretched out my arms and laid my palms on the earth, and, yes, the rocking persisted, the rocking of the island as it sailed through the sea and the night bearing into the future its freight of gulls and sparrows and fleas and apes and castaways, all unconscious now, save me. I fell asleep smiling.”

— J. M. Coetzee

124. “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.”

— J. M. Coetzee

125. “How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?”

— J. M. Coetzee

126. “For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.”

— J. M. Coetzee

127. “As for your Spanish, don’t worry, persist. One day it will cease to feel like a language, it will become the way things are.”

— J. M. Coetzee

128. “Aber vielleicht ist das die Natur des Todes, dass uns alles an ihm, jedes letzte Ding, unpassend erscheint.”

— J. M. Coetzee

129. “Children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don’t see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.”

— J. M. Coetzee

130. “The death cry of that hen imprinted itself on the boy’s memory so hauntingly that in 1958 he wrote an impassioned attack on the guillotine. As a result, in part, of that polemic, capital punishment was abolished in France. Who is to say, then, that the hen did not speak?”

— J. M. Coetzee

131. “The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption; yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves.”

— J. M. Coetzee

132. “There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas.”

— J. M. Coetzee

133. “The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.”

— J. M. Coetzee

134. “When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.”

— J. M. Coetzee

135. “So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?”

— J. M. Coetzee

136. “The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.”

— J. M. Coetzee

137. “Two names on the page, his and hers, side by side. Two in a bed, lovers no longer but foes.”

— J. M. Coetzee

138. “Jokes, secrets, complicities; a glance here, a word there: that is their way of being together, of being apart.”

— J. M. Coetzee

139. “Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.”

— J. M. Coetzee

140. “We cannot shrink in disgust from our neighbour’s touch because his hands, that are clean now, were once dirty. We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.”

— J. M. Coetzee

141. “And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant.”

— J. M. Coetzee

142. “Charakter ist Schicksal. Historie ist Gott.”

— J. M. Coetzee

143. “He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable.”

— J. M. Coetzee

144. “A risk to own anything : a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around. Not enough shoes, cars, cigarettes. Too many people too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day.”

— J. M. Coetzee

145. “Prose, in his experience, calls for many more words than poetry. There is no point in embarking on prose if one lacks confidence that one will be alive the next day to carry on with the task.”

— J. M. Coetzee

146. “I am not the we of anyone.”

— J. M. Coetzee

147. “The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.”

— J. M. Coetzee

148. “When death cuts all other links, there remains the name. Baptism: the union of a soul with a name, the name it will carry into eternity.”

— J. M. Coetzee

149. “Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.”

— J. M. Coetzee

150. “I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life.”

— J. M. Coetzee