Quotes By Author: j.m. coetzee

“In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before him. A fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue.What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant she is remembering the man who picked her up on the roadside in Africa and spent the night with her? Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness.”

“In a minute, in an hour, it will be too late; whatever is happening to her will be set in stone, will belong to the past. But now is not too late. Now he must do something”

“Charakter ist Schicksal. Historie ist Gott.”

“In der gegenwärtigen ‘Kultur’ geben sich wenige die Mühe, zwischen Aufrichtigkeit und dem Vorspielen von Aufrichtigkeit zu unterscheiden – ja, wenige sind zu dieser Unterscheidung überhaupt in der Lage -, wie auch nur wenige zwischen religiösem Glauben und dem Einhalten religiöser Vorschriften unterscheiden.”

“I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.”

“You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground… And so are you. So are we all.”

“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.”

“Asymmetrie [macht] Menschen unglücklich.”

“In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger’s embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them?”

“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.”