J.M. Coetzee
South African-Australian · 1940–
South African-Australian novelist and Nobel laureate whose spare, unsettling fiction confronts the structures of power, humiliation, and moral complicity. His work probes the limits of reason and empathy with an unflinching philosophical rigor.
Wikipedia ↗“The barbarians come out at night. Before nightfall the last goatherd must be brought in and the gate barred. At dawn we go out to face the new day. That is how we live.”
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“One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the justice of that. But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.”
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“If we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not out of fear — not out of a desire to look good in the eyes of the world.”
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“His whole inclination is to turn his face to the wall and forget about it. But it is not possible to forget, not possible to do nothing. He is in the grip of something that does not let go.”
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“There is a great deal that I am not saying. I choose what I say. What I do not say I withhold because I judge it to be of no significance, or because I judge it to be the kind of thing that needs no saying.”
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“I was not, not any longer, parsing sounds into words, words into sentences, sentences into meanings. On the contrary, the entire rigmarole of language seemed to be falling away, and what I was hearing were simply sounds, sounds with no inherent sense.”
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