You have a false understanding of what it means to read. Reading is not just turning printed signs into sounds. Reading is something deeper. True reading means hearing what the book has to say and pondering it – perhaps even having a conversation in your mind with the author. It means learning about the world – the world as it really is, not as you wish it to be.

— J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee Quotes

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

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

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

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

— J. M. Coetzee

But then, what are books for if not to change our lives?

— J. M. Coetzee

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

I am now no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy.

— J. M. Coetzee

I stood listening to the night breeze rustle the leaves, and watched the bats flicker against the last light, and felt the sweeping melancholy of those who pass their days in the midst of insupportable beauty in the knowledge that one day they will die.

— J. M. Coetzee

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

— J. M. Coetzee

Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.

— J. M. Coetzee

If I were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchistic quietistic pessimism or pessimistic quietistic anarchism: anarchism because experience tells me that what is wrong with politics is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am sceptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed.

— J. M. Coetzee

Technically he is old enough to be her father; but then, technically one can be a father at twelve.

— J. M. Coetzee

No one beats me, no one starves me, no one spits on me. How can I regard myself as a victim of prosecution when my sufferings are so petty? Yet they are all the more degrading for their pettiness.

— J.M. Coetzee

You have a false understanding of what it means to read. Reading is not just turning printed signs into sounds. Reading is something deeper. True reading means hearing what the book has to say and pondering it – perhaps even having a conversation in your mind with the author. It means learning about the world – the world as it really is, not as you wish it to be.

— J.M. Coetzee

They do us honor by seeing gods in us, and we respond by treating them like things.

— J.M. Coetzee

Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds?

— J.M. Coetzee

How can I accept that disaster has overtaken my life when the world continues to move so tranquilly through its cycles?

— J.M. Coetzee

Let me point out that a duck’s idea of being saved may be different from your idea of being saved. It may include being left in peace by human beings.

— J.M. Coetzee

When my mother was dying in hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

— J.M. Coetzee

The dead cannot be cheated, cannot be betrayed, unless you carry them with you in your heart and do the crime there.

— J.M. Coetzee
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