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J. M. Coetzee Quotes

born 1940 South Africa

John Maxwell Coetzee (born 9 February 1940), often called J. M.

South Africa
Academics
Essayists
Linguists
Nobel laureates

Also known as: Coetzee, Disgrace by J M Coetzee, Foe (J M Coetzee novel), J M Coetzee, J.M. Coetzee, John Maxwell Coetzee

Random J. M. Coetzee quote

122 quotes

I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story.

Foe (1986)

Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering.

Foe (1986)

Scandal. A pity that must be his theme, but he is in no state to improvise.

Disgrace (1999)

The nearest shops from where they live are a mile away along a bleak eucalyptus-lined road.

Boyhood (1998)

Though he had no more business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital.

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

The company of women made of him a lover of women and, to a certain extent, a womanizer."

Disgrace (1999)

The less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like tombs.

Foe (1986)

A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him…We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition.

Elizabeth Costello (2003)

A being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso.

Foe (1986)

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

Disgrace (1999)

You want to stop on the expressway, you pull fifty metres off the roadside...Anything nearer, you can get shot, no warning, no questions asked.'

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

This is the place where bodies are their own signs.

Foe (1986)

To live in silence is to live like the whales.

Foe (1986)

Cannibals are no less dull than Englishmen.

Foe (1986)

I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men.”

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help.

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

It was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies.

The Lives of Animals (1999)

Light in tone, the novel [Murphy] is Beckett’s response to the therapeutic orthodoxy that the patient should learn to engage with the larger world on the world’s terms.

Would you agree that Francis had a bit of a reputation? Did he sometimes exhibit unpredictable moods? Would you agree, Michael, that your brother possessed a history of violence?

The Pole and Other Stories (2023)

I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of a castaway is a castaway at heart

Foe (1986)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: J. M. Coetzee (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.