In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians
This letter has become a maze, and I a dog in the maze, scurrying up and down the branches and tunnels, scratching and whining at the same old places, tiring, tired. Why do I not call for help, call to God? Because God cannot help me. God is looking for me but he cannot reach me. God is another dog in another maze. I smell God and God smells me. I am the bitch in her time, God the male. God smells me, he can think of nothing else but finding me and taking me. Up and down the branches he bounds, scratching at the mesh. But he is lost as I am lost.
J. M. COETZEE, Age of Iron
I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.
J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians
Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.
Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task.
J.M. COETZEE, Giving Offense
All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians
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.
The barbarians come out at night.
J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians
Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.
J. M. COETZEE, Elizabeth Costello
One thought only preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.
J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians
Artists no longer starve in garrets. Some people may think this is not wholly a good thing, that being an artist has become too comfortable, at least in the West. I'm not sure I agree. It's a mark of civilization to encourage the arts and the life of the mind.
J. M. COETZEE, interview, Contemporary Literature, Autumn 1992
Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.
J. M. COETZEE, Elizabeth Costello
Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?
Perhaps if one flew high enough ... one would be able to see.
J. M. COETZEE, Life & Times of Michael K
If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.
J. M. COETZEE, Diary of a Bad Year
Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.
J. M. COETZEE, interview, Contemporary Literature, Autumn 1992
J. M. COETZEE, Elizabeth Costello
If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
J. M. COETZEE, Elizabeth Costello
Long visits don't make for good friends.
Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence. Yet why these glorious sunsets, I ask myself, if nature does not speak to us with tongues of fire.
J. M. COETZEE, In the Heart of the Country
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians
Why does love, even such love as he claims to practise, need the spectacle of beauty to bring it to life? What, in the abstract, do shapely legs have to do with love, or for that matter with desire? Or is that just the nature of nature, about which one does not ask questions?
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
J. M. COETZEE, Elizabeth Costello
The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.
J. M. COETZEE, Diary of a Bad Year
Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.
Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.
J. M. COETZEE, interview, Contemporary Literature, Autumn 1992
Reason is simply a vast tautology.
J. M. COETZEE, Elizabeth Costello
Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
J. M. COETZEE, In the Heart of the Country
There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.
J. M. COETZEE, Elizabeth Costello
Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.
Across valleys of space and time we strain ourselves to catch the pale smoke of each other's signals.
J. M. COETZEE, In the Heart of the Country
The older a man the more grotesque people find his couplings, like the spasms of a dying animal.
J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians
What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded--God knows how--in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.
J. M. COETZEE, Elizabeth Costello
One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.
J. M. COETZEE, In the Heart of the Country
The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
J. M. COETZEE, Elizabeth Costello
