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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.
J. M. Coetzee
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Corruption
Invention
Immortals
Gods
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Lacked
Death
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Two
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Exception
More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.
J. M. Coetzee
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
Pain is truth all else is subject to doubt.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
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.
J. M. Coetzee
The barbarians come out at night.
J. M. Coetzee
All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'
J. M. Coetzee
Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Perhaps but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
J. M. Coetzee
To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
J. M. Coetzee
