Quotes from J.M. Coetzee

Despite Marijana's bracing presence, he seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that turn into black gloom. He likes to think they come from elsewhere, episodes of bad weather that cross the sky and pass on. He prefers not to think they come from inside him and are his, part of him

Let me point out that a duck's idea of being saved may be different from your idea of being saved. It may include being left in peace by human beings.

I'll leave now,' says he, Simón.

Freud's warning that what I omit without thinking (i.e. without conscious thought) may be the key to the deepest truth about me?

As for your Spanish, don't worry, persist. One day it will cease to feel like a language, it will become the way things are.

He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. He tries not to sentimentalize the animals he kills, or to sentimentalize Bev Shaw. He avoids saying to her 'I don't know how you do it,' in order not to have to hear her say in return, 'Someone has to do it.

Photographs is not the same as just name, is more living. Otherwise, why save photographs? (Marijana to Mr Rayment)

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 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.

La gente que duda de sí misma no tiene alma. Yo estoy haciendo lo que puedo para fabricarme un alma, aunque sea al final de la vida.

but a hospital, it seemed, was a place for bodies, where bodies asserted their rights.

Never is he going to be his old self again. Never is he going to have his old resilience. Whatever inside him was given the task of mending the organism after it was so terribly assaulted, first on the road, then in the operating theatre, has grown too tired of the job, too overburdened. And the same holds for the rest of the team, the lungs, the heart, the muscles, the brain. They did for him what they could as long as they could; now they want to rest.

The humanities the core of the university. She may be an outsider, but if she were asked to name the core of the university today, its core discipline, she would say it was moneymaking. That is how it looks from Melbourne, Victoria; and she would not be surprised if the same were the case in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Imagine: to be prepared to yield, to yield, to have nothing more to yield, to be broken, yet to be pressed to yield more!

I don't like wine,' says Davíd. 'It's sour.' 'Wine is an acquired taste. When we are young we don't like it, then when we are older we acquire a taste for it.' 'I am never going to acquire a taste for it.' 'That's what you say. Let's wait and see.' Having

When death cuts all other links, there remains the name. Baptism: the union of a soul with a name, the name it will carry into eternity.

For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.

Can he find it in his heart to love this plain, ordinary woman? Can he love her enough to write a music for her? If he cannot, what is left for him?

Two names on the page, his and hers, side by side. Two in a bed, lovers no longer but foes.

Do I believe in helping people? he wondered. He might help people, he might not help them, he did not know beforehand, anything was possible. He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help. Perhaps I am the stony ground, he thought.

Jokes, secrets, complicities; a glance here, a word there: that is their way of being together, of being apart.

Lucy was frightened, frightened near to death. Her voice choked, she could not breath, her limbs went numb. This is not happening, she said to herself as the men forced her down; it is just a dream, a nightmare. While the men, for their part, drank up her fear, revelled in it, did all they could to hurt her, to menace her, to heighten her terror. Call your dogs! they said to her. Go on, call your dogs! No dogs? Then let us show you dogs!

We cannot shrink in disgust from our neighbour's touch because his hands, that are clean now, were once dirty. We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

El espacio es sólo espacio, la vida sólo es vida, igual en todas partes.

You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we led of Cruso's island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day.