J. M. Coetzee Quotes

I was never really interested in studies and was hot-headed and rebellious in college, as I was totally confused and insecure but was not coming to terms with it.

Pippin chooses love and finds a greater sense of himself at the end of all the madness. I relate to him in many ways. I have been through stuff, thought I knew best, and often been proven wrong.

I reject the idea of myself as a tragic figure.

I don't want to be the Grinch.

I've kept going to therapy to find out why my perspective is so skewered and why I'm filled with rage. It's so I can live in this world alongside these other people who seem to be what is desired and what the world wants.

How can I ask anyone to love me when all I do is beg to be left alone?

You cannot escape what you have to deal with inside yourself. It will never bring good things. It will only bring madness.

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

It's easier to believe in this sweet madness, oh this glorious sadness, that brings me to my knees.

And all the time he was enjoying his badness, hugging it to him as though it were a friend, and not caring a bit.

When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.

Don't give me no rotten tomato, 'cause all I ever wanted was your sweet potato.

I am weary of personal worrying, in love with the art of madness.

You are making an inopportune rejection of what Nature has given you today, if all your mind is set on what men will say of you tomorrow.

Self-rejection is the biggest sin that you can commit.

Shameless actually good since it gives a kind of freedom. We consider the old, functionless shame destructive. Today, if you have a strong sense of shame you also have a strong desire to overcome it. And that's when you can write.

We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.

I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time.

Evil is a broad church. There are so many different ways to be evil. Sometimes it's fun to be the guy who doesn't know that he's bad, like the character I played in True Blood. He was pretty angsty about it, but he thought he was doing the right thing.

I think that Diwata does not fit that mold. She's loud, she's a huge personality, she's imposing. I don't know if I'm the same thing in that sense, but what gives me the joy in playing her is the total rejection of needing to fit in. It's so inspiring.

Bingo pup. It's a lesson best learned early. They're all afraid of us." He strolled over to Derek. "You're trying to be a good kid, aren't you? You think that'll show them they're wrong. So how'd that working out for you? Guess what? They don't care. To them, you're a monster, and nothing you do--or don't do--will change their minds. My advice? Give 'em what they want. It's a short, brutal life." He smiled. "Live it up." Derek stared straight ahead, patiently waiting. "He can't hear a word I'm saying, can he?" Liam said. "Nope.

Of all sweet passions Shame is the loveliest.

You can have me the way i am — bad behavior included — or not at all.

The amount of stress in your life is determined by how much energy you expend resisting your life.