“ 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. J.M. Coetzee
“ Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for? J.M. Coetzee
“ The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die ra… J.M. Coetzee
“ Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might truly be himsel… J.M. Coetzee
“ 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… J.M. Coetzee
“ What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out. J.M. Coetzee
“ All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I own proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. J.M. Coetzee
“ If Jesus had stooped to play politics he might have become a key man in Roman Judea, a big operator. It was because he was indifferent to politics, and made his indifference clear, that he was liquida… J.M. Coetzee
“ Die Wahrheit wird nicht im Zorn gesprochen. Die Wahrheit, wenn sie denn gesprochen wird, wird im Geist der Liebe gesprochen. J.M. Coetzee
“ 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… J.M. Coetzee
“ Is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing place of memories? J.M. Coetzee
“ It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories. J.M. Coetzee
“ 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. J.M. Coetzee
“ To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy. J.M. Coetzee
“ A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circula… J.M. Coetzee
“ 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. J.M. Coetzee
“ Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence. J.M. Coetzee
“ Why has he taken this job?... For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men d… J.M. Coetzee
