242 Quotes by J. M. Coetzee

Well, cast your mind back to the books he wrote. What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book? It is that the woman doesn’t fall in love with the man. The man may or may not love the woman; but the woman never loves the man. What do you think that theme reflects? My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn’t fall for him – not women in their right senses. They inspected him, maybe they even tried him our. Then they moved on.

If it is indeed impossible – or at least very difficult – to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

Long visits don’t make for good friends.

For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology.

Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.

Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn’t change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.

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.

Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?

The death cry of that hen imprinted itself on the boy’s memory so hauntingly that in 1958 he wrote an impassioned attack on the guillotine. As a result, in part, of that polemic, capital punishment was abolished in France. Who is to say, then, that the hen did not speak?