J.M. Coetzee

“You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.”

“A risk to own anything : a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around. Not enough shoes, cars, cigarettes. Too many people too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day.”

“Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?”

“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.”

“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”

“I don't know what you do about sex and I don't want to know, but this is not the way to go about it. You're what – fifty-two? Do you think a young girl finds any pleasure in going to bed with a man of that age? Do you think she finds it good to watch you in the middle of your...? Do you ever think about that?"He is silent."Don't expect sympathy from me, David, and don't expect sympathy from anyone else either. No sympathy, no mercy, not in this day and age. Everyone's hand will be against you, and why not? Really, how could you?"The old tone has entered, the tone of the last years of their married life: passionate recrimination. Even Rosalind must be aware of that. Yet perhaps she has a point. Perhaps it is the right of the young to be protected from the sight of their elders in the throes of passion. That is what whores are for, after all: to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely.”

“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”

“In a while the organism will repair itself, and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again. But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float toward his end.”

“Die Wahrheit wird nicht im Zorn gesprochen. Die Wahrheit, wenn sie denn gesprochen wird, wird im Geist der Liebe gesprochen.”

“The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.”

“Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.”

“In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.”

“I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones.”

“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.”

“There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.”

“I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.”

“What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?”

“Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.”

“Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.”

“Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.”