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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.
J. M. Coetzee
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 85
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
Essayist
Librettist
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Novelist
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University Teacher
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Stirred
Lament
Stirring
Gods
Likely
Loss
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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.
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[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
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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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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
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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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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 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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From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.
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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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His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
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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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Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
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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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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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If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
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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.
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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 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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