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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

They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

Day by day the wind picks at the roof and the weeds creep across the terraces.

Foe (1986)

It is the mother and children who make up the core and the husband only a contributor to the economy as a paying lodger might be.

Boyhood (1998)

Spoken without irony, the words stay with him and will not go away.

Disgrace (1999)

“His mother is entitled to her convictions, he believes. If she wants to spend her declining years making propaganda against cruelty to animals, that is her right.”

Elizabeth Costello (2003)

Confessions, apologies: why this thirst for abasement? A hush falls. They circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off.

Disgrace (1999)

To hold us in check when our desires grow immoderate. As long as our desires are moderate we have no need of laws.

Foe (1986)

It reminds me too much of Mao’s China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology.

Disgrace (1999)

He could not imagine ... driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

Truly, man was not made to live alone!

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

“You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”

Foe (1986)

This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

It continues to astound him that people can be as clever as people are in the computer industry, yet have no outside interests beyond cars and house prices. — Chapter 18, page 149.

Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002)

It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain.

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

Talking to Petrus is like punching a bag of sand.
'Are you giving him up?'
'Yes, I am giving him up.'

Disgrace (1999)

Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe. That is my entreaty.

Foe (1986)

It was I who shared Cruso's bed and closed Cruso's eyes.

Foe (1986)

Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.

Slow Man (2005)

At last I could row no further.

Foe (1986)

Attribution

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