List of J. M. Coetzee Quotes

There Is First Of All The Problem Of The Opening, Namely, How To Get Us From Where We Are, Which Is, As Yet, Nowhere, To The Far Bank. It Is A Simple Bridging Problem, A Problem Of Knocking Together A Bridge. People Solve Such Problems Every Day. They Solve Them, And Having Solved Them Push On.

His Mouth Opens. From Inside Him Comes A Slow Stream, Without Breath, Without Interruption. It Flows Up Through His Body And Out Upon Me; It Passes Through The Cabin, Through The Wreck; Washing The Cliffs And Shores Of The Island, It Runs Northward And Southward To The Ends Of The Earth. Soft And Cold, Dark And Unending, It Beats Against My Eyelids, Against The Skin Of My Face.

Scapegoating Worked In Practice While It Still Had Religious Powers Behind It. You Loaded The Sins Of The City On To The Goat’s Back And Drove It Out, And The City Was Cleansed. It Worked Because Everyone Knew How To Read The Ritual, Including The Gods. Then The Gods Died, And All Of A Sudden You Had To Cleanse The City Without Divine Help. Real Actions Were Demanded Instead Of Symbolism The Censor Was Born, In The Roman Sense. Watchfulness Became The Watchword: The Watchfulness Of All Over All. Purgation Was Replaced By The Purge.

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. Stretches Of English Code Whole Sentences Long Have Thickened, Lost Their Articulations, Their Articulateness, Their Articulatedness. Like A Dinosaur Expiring And Settling In The Mud, The Language Has Stiffened. Pressed Into The Mold Of English, Petrus's Story Would Come Out Arthritic, Bygone"(117).

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.

But It Is The Knowledge Of How Contingent My Unease Is, How Dependent On A Baby That Wails Beneath My Window One Day And Does Not Wail The Next, That Brings The Worst Shame To Me, The Greatest Indifference To Annihilation. I Know Somewhat Too Much; And From This Knowledge, Once One Has Been Infected, There Seems To Be No Recovering. I Ought Never To Have Taken My Lantern To See What Was Going On In The Hut By The Granary. On The Other Hand, There Was No Way, Once I Had Picked Up The Lantern, For Me To Put It Down Again. The Knot Loops In Upon Itself; I Cannot Find The End.

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.

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.

It Seemed To Me That All Things Were Possible On The Island, All Tyrannies And Cruelties, Though In Small; And If, In Despite Of What Was Possible, We Lived At Peace With Another, Surely This Was Proof That Certain Laws Unknown To Us Held Sway, Or Else That We Had Been Following The Promptings Of Our Hearts All This Time, And Our Hearts Had Not Betrayed Us.

Speaking The Words He Had Been Taught, Directing Them No Longer Upward But To The Earth On Which He Knelt, He Prayed: 'for What We Are About To Receive Make Us Truly Thankful.' ... He... Felt His Heart Suddenly Flow Over With Thankfulness... Like A Gush Of Warm Water... All That Remains Is To Live Here Quietly For The Rest Of My Life, Eating Food That My Own Labour Has Made The Earth To Yield. All That Remains Is To Be A Tender Of The Soil.

Artists No Longer Starve In Garrets. Some People May Think This Is Not Wholly A Good Thing, That Being An Artist Has Become Too Comfortable, At Least In The West. I'm Not Sure I Agree. It's A Mark Of Civilization To Encourage The Arts And The Life Of The Mind.

The Most Important Of All Rights Is The Right To Life, And I Cannot Foresee A Day When Domesticated Animals Will Be Granted That Right In Law.