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Quote by J. M. Coetzee

“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?”

Quote by J. M. Coetzee

Work

In this thought-provoking novel, the protagonist's journey through life's later years delves into profound questions about existence, memory, and the nature of human experience. more

Author

J.M. Coetzee is a South African-born Australian novelist known for his profound psychological insights and critical exploration of South Africa's apartheid history. His works have won numerous literary awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature. more

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“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.”

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“Unbelief is a belief.”

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“If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.”

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“Long visits don't make for good friends.”

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“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.”

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Book:In the Heart of the Country: A Novel

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“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.”

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Book:Diary of a Bad Year

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“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.”

Novel Prove Passing Passings Novelists Passing Away Switzerland Denmark Great Novels

Author:J. M. Coetzee

“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.”

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“Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.”

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“It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from 'the wise man's mouth' but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.”

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Book:Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship

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