Quotes from J.M. Coetzee

Why should our rulers, normally phlegmatic men, react with sudden hysteria to the pinpricks of terrorism when for decades they were able to go about their everyday business unruffled, in full awareness that in a deep bunker somewhere in the Urals an enemy watched and waited with a finger on a button, ready if provoked to wipe them and their cities from the face of the earth?

Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.

Trotzdem konnte er sich nicht vorstellen, sein Leben damit zu verbringen, Grenzpfähle in die Erde zu treiben, Zäune zu errichten, das Land aufzuteilen. Er sah sich nicht als etwas Schweres, das Spuren hinterließ, sondern allenfalls als einen winzigen Fleck auf der Oberfläche der Erde, die zu fest schlief, um das Kratzen eines Ameisenfußes, das Raspeln von Schmetterlingszähnen, das Taumeln von Staub zu bemerken.

if Jesus had stooped to play politics he might have become a key man in Roman Judea, a big operator. It was because he was indifferent to politics, and made his indifference clear, that he was liquidated. How to live one's life outside politics, and one's death too: that was the example he set for his followers.

that somewhere from amidst the welter of sound there will dart up, like a bird, a single authentic note of immortal longing.

Pain is nothing, just a warning signal from the body to the brain. Pain is no more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing. Biut of course he is wrong.

If I were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchistic quietistic pessimism or pessimistic quietistic anarchism: anarchism because experience tells me that what is wrong with politics is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am sceptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed.

You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.

If you are not fully in the game you are playing, however, you are not truly playing it.

Technically he is old enough to be her father; but then, technically one can be a father at twelve.

The path that leads through Latin and alebra is not the path to material success. But it may suggest much more: that understanding things is a waste of time; that if you want to succeed in the world and have a happy family and a nice home and a BMW you should not try to understand things but just add up the numbers or press the buttons or do whatever else it is that marketers are so richly rewarded for doing.

Podríamos dejar que este intercambio de cortesías de rigor fallezca de muerte natural?

A uno le gustaría seguir sintiendo cierto respeto por cualquier persona que prefiere la muerte al deshonor

Flowers grow best on dungheaps, as Shakespeare never tires of saying.

poetry takes you either now or never. A flash of discovery and a flash of answers. Like the lighting. Like the falling in love.

women's beauty doesn't belong to the women herself. She's the part of treasure, which she brings into the world. It's her duty to share it.

From the most beautiful creatures our lust rises... so that the beauty of rose could never die.

Women are sensitive to it, to the weight of the desiring gaze.

The filth of village; honestly acquired.

The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, in this time, it is not. It is my bussines, mine alone. 'This place being what?' 'This place being South Africa

We partake of the ideal but we also make poo.

There are too much of them according to our scales, not to theirs... The more, the happier.

Tú crees que Simón te quiere todo el tiempo? Claro que no. Te quiere y te odia, todo está mezclado en su interior, aunque él no te lo dirá. No, él lo mantiene en secreto y finge que dentro de él todo es plácido, unas aguas remansadas y sin olas. Igual que su forma de hablar; nuestro famoso hombre racional. Pero créeme, el viejo Simón tiene tanto lío dentro como tú y como yo.

Moer and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth in South Africa.