Quotes from J.M. Coetzee

You have a false understanding of what it means to read. Reading is not just turning printed signs into sounds. Reading is something deeper. True reading means hearing what the book has to say and pondering it— perhaps even having a conversation in your mind with the author. It means learning about the world— the world as it really is, not as you wish it to be.

Es ist nicht die Sprache, die den Menschen zum Menschen macht, sondern die Sprache der anderen.

Charakter ist Schicksal. Historie ist Gott.

I stood listening to the night breeze rustle the leaves, and watched the bats flicker against the last light, and felt the sweeping melancholy of those who pass their days in the midst of insupportable beauty in the knowledge that one day they will die.

in the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself.

When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.

Konkurrenz ist eine Sublimierung von Krieg.

In der gegenwärtigen 'Kultur' geben sich wenige die Mühe, zwischen Aufrichtigkeit und dem Vorspielen von Aufrichtigkeit zu unterscheiden - ja, wenige sind zu dieser Unterscheidung überhaupt in der Lage -, wie auch nur wenige zwischen religiösem Glauben und dem Einhalten religiöser Vorschriften unterscheiden.

He would never want to diminish that event, that blow. It was nothing less than a calamity. It has shrunk his world, turned him into a prisoner. But escaping death ought to have shaken him up, opened windows inside him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before , only greyer and drearier. Enough to drive one to drink.

All that I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to the grave by old friends.

Is this love - this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?

To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being – not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation – a heavily affective sensation – of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world.

I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one's bones.

we can pretend that the book in question is not Mr. West's but mine, made mine by the madness of my reading.

Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.

When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers?

Kafka saw both himself and Red Peter as hybrids, as monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies.

we can only know and understand ourselves fully through others – through the way we experience others and ourselves in relation to others, and the way others experience us. This

we are on the road from no A to no B in the world...

Truth is not spoken in anger.Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love.

The heart can be a mysterious organ, the heart and its movements. Dark, the Spanish call it. The dark heart, el oscuro cotazón. Are you sure you are not just a little dark-hearted, Paul, despite your many good intentions?

In the act of writing he experiences, today, an exceptional sensual pleasure -- in the feel of the pen, snug in the crook of his thumb, but even more in the feel of his hand being tugged back lightly from its course across the page by the strict, unvarying shape of the letters, the discipline of the alphabet.

No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.

There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas.