Top J. M. Coetzee Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

J. M. Coetzee Biography

John Maxwell Coetzee ([kutˈseː], kuut-SEE, Afrikaans: [kutˈsɪə], kuut-SEE-(ə) ; born 9 February 1940) is a South African novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaide. He became an Australian citizen in 2006.

Read about J. M. Coetzee in Wikipedia

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J. M. Coetzee Quotes

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

Early, Early Life, Impressionable, Influence, Reads, Writers

Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.

Consists, Difficult, Difficulty, Live, People

Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?

Admiration, Desire, Distinct, Lying, Two, Woman

Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

Baths, Brush, Forces, Healing, Longer, Sleep

Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.

Imagined, Perhaps, Unimaginable

I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.

Broken, Half, Halves, Self, Selves

The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.

Devil, Light, Skin, Skins, Under

You think you know what is just and what is not. I understand. We all think we know. " I had no doubt, myself, then, that at each moment each one of us, man, woman, child, perhaps even the poor old horse turning the mill-wheel, knew what was just: all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice. "But we live in a world of laws," I said to my poor prisoner, "a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade.

Children, Horse, Memories, Understand, Uphold, Woman

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies,as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect,but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.

Deny, Fiction, Intuition, Invention, Wish

There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.

Bridges, Having, Knocking, People, Simple

All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.

Economies, Government, National, School, Skills, Turn

It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.

Following, Heart, Islands, Laws, Sympathy, Things

Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.

Belief, Energy, Idea, Ideas, Running, Source

I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.

Beauty, Bone, Bones, Forsaken, World

Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.

Imagination, Imagine, Nothing, Worse

The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

Beauty, Ideas, Roles, Today, Dead, Idea

The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.

Thinking, Connections, Type, Ability, Aristotle

In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them? (Susan Barton)

Eyelid, Giving, Voice, World, Worse, Yield

Long visits don't make for good friends.

Friends, Good, Good Friend, Long, Visits

What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded--God knows how--in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

Enought, Giving, Lock, Locks, Miraculous, Past

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