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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.

J. M. Coetzee

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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
Essayist
Librettist
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Humans
Least
Temptation
Writing
Animal
Belong
Heart
Impossible
Project
Mind
Upon
Indeed
Difficult
Animals
Feelings
Projects
May
Thoughts
Human
Consciousness
Inhabit

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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.
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I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
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I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
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Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.
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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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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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Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
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His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough(72).
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If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
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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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The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
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And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
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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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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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Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
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Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
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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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The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
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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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