J.M. Coetzee: Quotes about people

J.M. Coetzee is South African writer. Explore interesting quotes on people.
J.M. Coetzee: 122   quotes 0   likes

“Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.”

J.M. Coetzee book Summertime

Source: Summertime

People , Personality

“Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.”

J.M. Coetzee book Waiting for the Barbarians

Source: Waiting for the Barbarians

People , Dependency

“The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: How can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do.
If you wish to counter the man in the street, it cannot be by appeal to moral principles, much less by demanding that people should run their lives in such a way that there are no contradictions between what they say and what they do. Ordinary life is full of contradictions; ordinary people are used to accommodating them. Rather, you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fraudulent.”

J.M. Coetzee book Diary of a Bad Year

Source: Diary of a Bad Year (2007), p. 17

Life , People , World , Way

“Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and the desperate. Around them, guards in olive green uniforms prance with demonic energy and glee, cattle prods and billy-clubs at the ready. They touch the prisoners with the prods and the prisoners leap; they wrestle prisoners to the ground and shove the clubs up their anuses and the prisoners go into spasms. In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs.
One day it will be done, though not by me. It may even be a hit in London and Berlin and New York. It will have absolutely no effect on the people it targets, who could not care less what ballet audiences think of them.”

J.M. Coetzee book Diary of a Bad Year

Diary of a Bad Year (2007)

People , Thinking , Dance

“Paul here is unhappy because unhappiness is second nature to him but more particularly because he has not the faintest idea of how to bring about his heart's desire. And I am unhappy because nothing is happening. Four people in four corners, moping, like tramps in Beckett, and myself in the middle, wasting time, being wasted by time.”

J.M. Coetzee book Slow Man

Slow Man (2004)

People , Idea , Nature , Time

“The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka—Poles, for the most part—said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in a general way they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake.”

J.M. Coetzee book The Lives of Animals

Source: The Lives of Animals (1999), p. 19

People , Way , Sense , Parting

““It's been such a short visit, I haven't had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.”
She watches the wipers wagging back and forth. “A better explanation,” she says, “is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.”
“What is it you can't say?”
“It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, ‘Yes, it's nice, isn't it? Polish-Jewish skin it's made of, we find that's best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.’ And then I go to the bathroom and the soap-wrapper says, ‘Treblinka— 100% human stearate.’ Am I dreaming, I say to myself?””

J.M. Coetzee book The Lives of Animals

Source: The Lives of Animals (1999), p. 69

Money , People , Dreams , Business

“[Being peppered with invitations to travel far and wide to give lectures] has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.”

J.M. Coetzee

Dagens Nyheter http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee interview with David Attwell (December 8, 2003)

People , World , Travel , Thinking

“As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day.”

J.M. Coetzee

Dagens Nyheter http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee interview with David Attwell (December 8, 2003)

People

“Coming to the farm from Worcester, where Coloured people seem to have to beg for whatever they get, he is relieved at how correct and formal relations are between his uncle and the volk. Each morning, his uncle confers with his two men about the day's tasks. He does not give them orders. Instead he proposes the tasks that need to be done, as if dealing cards on a table; his men deal their own cards too. In between, there are pauses, long, reflective silences in which nothing happens.”

J.M. Coetzee

Boyhood (1998)

Men , People , Silence