J. M. Coetzee Quotes

It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.

This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there's this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity.

The good news is that the president gets another chance. The bad news is that he'll be two weeks older.

Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.

As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time.

It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

Time just gets away from us.

Didn't we, like our grandchildren, begin with a childhood we thought would never end? Now, all of a sudden, I'm older than my parents were when I thought they were old.

Middle age is the way you would feel about summer if you knew there would never be another spring.

Turning 50 gives me more yesterdays than tomorrows.

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

Time is truly the great enemy. It's not the great healer, it's the great stealer.

At my age days dissolve like salt in water; the day's gone and I don't even know what I've done with the hours.

Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

Life isn't moving quickly - time moves very quickly.

Years are like candy bars... We're paying more, but they're getting shorter.

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

when you are old and realize that time is running out, you start imagining that you have the cure for all the ills of the world in your hand, and get frustrated because no one pays you any attention.

Maybe it's just getting older, but I don't want to miss things.

We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn.

... 'I've been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I've seen and lived as hard as I could, and it's been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything's gliding away from me, and I don't remember, and I don't care, and yet now is right when I need it!'. [pp. 84-85]

Another tea-time, another day older.

The most precious thing a human being has to give is time. There is so very little of it, after all, in a life.