Quotes from JM Coetzee

We can only know and understand ourselves fully through others — through the way we experience others and ourselves in relation to others, and the way others experience us.

Truth is not spoken in anger.Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love.

There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas.

It was no longer a matter of growing a fat crop, only of growing enough for the seed not to die out. There will be another year, he consoled himself, another summer in which to try again.

Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier.

Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds?

The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear the ground for them. Clearing ground an piling stones is little enough, but it is better than sitting in idleness.

Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.

In my own terms, I am being punished for what happened... I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being. Is it enough for God, do you think, that I live in disgrace without term?

Despite Marijana's bracing presence, he seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that turn into black gloom. He likes to think they come from elsewhere, episodes of bad weather that cross the sky and pass on. He prefers not to think they come from inside him and are his, part of him

Imagine: to be prepared to yield, to yield, to have nothing more to yield, to be broken, yet to be pressed to yield more!