242 Quotes by J. M. Coetzee

It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.

How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?

But two and two do equal four. Unless you give some strange, special meaning to equal. You can count it off for yourself: one two three four. If two and two really equalled three then everything would collapse into chaos. We would be in another universe, with other physical laws. In the existing universe two and two equal four. It is a universal rule, independent of us, not man-made at all. Even if you and I were to cease to be, two and two would go on equalling four.

I said to myself, ‘If you don’t sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?’

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

He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.

Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.

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.

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