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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.

J. M. Coetzee

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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
Essayist
Librettist
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Novelist
Poet
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Screenwriter
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University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Moments
Gas
Care
Steel
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Throat
Even
Relax
Tasteless
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Cease
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Despair
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Limbs

More quotes by J. M. Coetzee

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One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.
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Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.
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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 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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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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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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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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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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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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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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So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?
J. M. Coetzee
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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.
J. M. Coetzee
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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
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Pain is truth all else is subject to doubt.
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We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
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Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.
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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?'
J. M. Coetzee
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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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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.
J. M. Coetzee