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In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
J. M. Coetzee
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
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University Teacher
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Close
Suffering
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Heart
Cruel
Hearts
More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
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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 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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And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
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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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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.
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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.
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Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
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She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.
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If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
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The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
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I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.
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In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
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I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'
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When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.
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The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.
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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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Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.
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I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
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