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

J. M. Coetzee Quotes

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

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

For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.

— J. M. Coetzee

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

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

— J. M. Coetzee

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

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

— J. M. Coetzee

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

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
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