Quote

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.

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
Experience
Speaks
Firsts
Falling
First
Response
Love
Sight
Like
Poetry
Revelation
Either
Lightning
Fall
Flash
Speak
Revelations

More quotes by J. M. Coetzee

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I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.
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All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
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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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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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When all else fails, philosophize.
J. M. Coetzee
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It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.
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In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
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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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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
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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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Perhaps but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
J. M. Coetzee
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Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
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Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.
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The barbarians come out at night.
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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.
J. M. Coetzee
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All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.
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Unbelief is a belief.
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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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Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.
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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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