127 Quotes by J.M. Coetzee

Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world... But there are other people to do these things - the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing, even the Byron thing. He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it.

His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72).

Es ist nicht die Sprache, die den Menschen zum Menschen macht, sondern die Sprache der anderen.

Hinter der Kritik am müßigen Leben und der Rechtfertigung unablässigen Geschäftigseins stehen Auffassungen, die nicht länger ausgesprochen werden müssen, so offenkundig erscheinen sie: dass jedermann auf Erden der einen oder anderen Nation angehören und innerhalb der einen oder anderen Volkswirtschaft tätig sein müsse; dass diese Volkswirtschaften miteinander im Wettbewerb stehen.

Prose, in his experience, calls for many more words than poetry. There is no point in embarking on prose if one lacks confidence that one will be alive the next day to carry on with the task.

Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.

A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.

I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the one least fitted to write a memorial. Better the blacksmith with his cries of rage and woe.

To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.