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We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
J. M. Coetzee
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
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Novelist
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University Teacher
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Certain
Must
Tolerable
Blindness
Cultivate
Ignorance
Society
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Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.
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Perhaps but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
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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.
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The barbarians come out at night.
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From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.
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[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
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In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.
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Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
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My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.
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The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
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Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
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Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
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Pain is truth all else is subject to doubt.
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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.
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Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
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Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.
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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.
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Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
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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.
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