Quotes from J.M. Coetzee

Valgymas yra ritualas, o ritualai lengvina gyvenimÄ….

detectaba en los ojos de los babuinos mayores los aguijonazos de la melancolía, el nacimiento de la conciencia incipiente de su mortalidad.

The world is more various than we ever give it credit for.

Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else has come to terms with it , why can't you? Why can't you?

Significa que está madurando? ¿En eso se resume madurar: superar los anhelos, la pasión, todas las intensidades del alma?

Mirad, leed este libro y todas vuestras preguntas encontrarán respuesta». O «Mirad, he aquí una vida nueva para vosotros».

Be attentive to yourself as you write and you will mark there are times when the words form themselves on the paper de novo, as the Romans used to say, out of the deepest of inner silences.

As you speak I swear I can hear words being selected, one after another, from the word-box you carry around with you, and slotted into place. That is not how a true native speak, one who is born into a language.' 'How does a native speak?' 'From the heart. Words well up within and he sings them, sings along with them. So to speak.

When my mother was dying in hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

Turb?t kol žmogus gyvas, tol jam viskas gerai.

Kaimo gyventojai nuolat rezga planus, kaip pakenkti kaimynams - linki jiems parazit?, nederliaus, finansin?s katastrofos, - ta?iau ištikus krizei visi pasireng? pad?ti.

I hope that in the afterlife we will get a chance, each of us, to say our sorries to the people we have wronged.

A man who wants to live cannot live in a house with lights in the windows. He must live in a hole and hide by day. A man must live so that he leaves no trace of his living. That is what it has come to.

No, yo ya estoy casada, gracias –le dije–. Búscate una mujer más apropiada que yo, alguien que te haga salir de ti mismo.

The stories they tell will be different from the stories I heard in the camp, because the camp was for those left behind, the women and children, the old men, the blind, the crippled, the idiots, people who have nothing to tell but stories of how they have endured. Whereas these young men have had adventures, victories and defeats and escapes. They will have stories to tell long after the war is over, stories for a lifetime, stories for their grandchildren to listen to open-mouthed.

No será la belleza otro objeto de consumo, como el vino? Uno lo bebe, lo traga y nos da una breve sensación placentera, embriagadora, pero ¿qué queda? Lo que el vino deja como saldo, con tu perdón, es la orina; ¿cuál es el saldo de la belleza? ¿En qué te hace bien? ¿Nos hace mejores?

So what is it, he thought, that binds me to this spot of earth as if to a home I cannot leave? We must all leave home, after all, we must all leave our mothers. Or am I such a child, such a child from such a line of children, that none of us can leave, but have to come back to die here with our heads upon our mothers' laps, I upon hers, she upon her mother's, and so back and back, generation upon generation?

Sólo es una cuestión de edad, de ciclos de deseo y de apatía de un cuerpo que lentamente se enfría y muere. Cuando era joven el simple olor de una mujer me excitaba: ahora solo la más dulce, la más joven, la más reciente tiene ese poder. Cualquier día de estos serán jovencitos. Esperando los bárbaros

El niño ha sido entregado a su madre. Como uno de esos grises insectos macho cuya única función es transmitir su semilla a la hembra, podría marchitarse y morir. No le queda nada en lo que basar su vida.

Qué le da derecho a sentir asco por los tópicos cuando el resto del mundo los acepta y vive de acuerdo con ellos?

Sólo es una cuestión de edad, de ciclos de deseo y de apatía de un cuerpo que lentamente se enfría y muere. Cuando era joven el simple olor de una mujer me excitaba: ahora solo la más dulce, la más joven, la más reciente tiene ese poder. Cualquier día de estos serán jovencitos.

en cuanto empiece a comprender que el universo, no solo en la esfera de los números, sino en todo, está gobernado por leyes, y que nada ocurre por azar, se calmará y entrará en razón.

a rival line, on his small beginnings out at the dam. Even his tools should be of wood and leather and gut, materials the insects would eat when one day he no longer needed them.

There was a cord of tenderness that stretched from him to the patch of earth beside the dam and must be cut. It seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again.