Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
J. M. CoetzeeRead
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Words have the power to create distance between people, as they fail to convey deep desires and emotions.
In this quote, J. M. Coetzee suggests that language, while a tool for communication, often fails to capture the intensity of human desires. He implies that words can create barriers, making true emotional connections difficult, as they reduce personal experience to mere exchange rather than genuine understanding or connection.
Themes
LanguageDesireCommunicationWordsAlienationPhilosophyConnection
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the limitations of verbal communication in relationships.
More from J. M. Coetzee
All quotes βChildren all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don't see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.
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The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.
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My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.
J. M. CoetzeeRead
He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.
J. M. CoetzeeRead
Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.
J. M. CoetzeeRead
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