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J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee Quotes

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Famous J. M. Coetzee Quotes

“His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.”

EndsBodyRunningEarthFacesDarkColdBeatsMouthsFlowSkinsBreathsIslandsStreamsShoreCliffsWrecksWashingInterruptionsUnendingCabinsEyelids
Book:Foe: A Novel
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“One thought alone 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.”

MindEndsNightDiesCitiesEnemyPopulationBonesDisasterPursueErasEmpiresCunningRuthlessPyramidsBarbariansAcresDesolationSubmergedBloodhounds
Book:Waiting for the Barbarians
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“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 towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that 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.”

KnowsHas BeensEndsMomentsBodyCareLife IsPleasureBloodDespairLeavingBreatheCeaseStreamsRelaxGasGoing AwayThroatSteelLeafsBreezeLimbsFloatsNourishment
Author:J. M. Coetzee
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“But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.”

KnowsWayDoeHas BeensEndsHandsSeemsNextTakenToo MuchWorstBabyOughtOne DayWindowShameIndifferenceDependentKnotsAnnihilationLoopsRecoveringHutsLanterns
Book:Waiting for the Barbarians: A Novel
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“They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?...all this discussion of consciousness and whether animals have it is just a smokescreen. At bottom we protect our own kind. Thumbs up to human babies, thumbs down to veal calves.”

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Author:J. M. Coetzee
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“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”

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Book:The Lives of Animals: The Lives of Animals [Princeton Classics]
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