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Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
J. M. Coetzee
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Pain
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Must
Subsist
Everywhere
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More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
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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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The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.
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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
J. M. Coetzee
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).
J. M. Coetzee
Unbelief is a belief.
J. M. Coetzee
I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
J. M. Coetzee
Pain is truth all else is subject to doubt.
J. M. Coetzee
Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.
J. M. Coetzee
To me, a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether you have a white or a black skin, and a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether or not you know the difference between a subject and a predicate, are more alike than they are unlike.
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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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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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We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.
J. M. Coetzee
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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And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
J. M. Coetzee
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
