J. M. Coetzee Quotes
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It is a world of words that creates a world of things.
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If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.
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I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.
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But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.
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When all else fails, philosophize.
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Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.
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The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
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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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There is nothing more humanly beautiful than a woman's breasts. Nothing more humanly beautiful, nothing more humanly mysterious than why men should want to caress, over and over again, with paintbrush or chisel or hand, these oddly curved fatty sacs, and nothing more humanly endearing than our complicity (I mean the complicity of women) in their obsession.
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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.
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Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.
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The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
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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 spark of true poetry flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together.
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he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
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For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.
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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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Long visits don't make for good friends.
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He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).
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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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[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
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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.
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There seemed nothing to do but live.
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Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
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Anyone who says that life matters less to an animal than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being animals to have an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh...I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.
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One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.
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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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The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.
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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?
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Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
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