Frasi di John Maxwell Coetzee (86 frasi, pagina 2)

John Maxwell Coetzee: 86 frasi 16 Mi piace

John Maxwell Coetzee frasi celebri

“Si fa l'abitudine a tutto, anche al continuo peggioramento di ciò che già era ai limiti della sopportazione.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Vergogna

Vergogna

“Io stesso allora non dubitavo che in qualunque momento chiunque di noi, uomo, donna, bambino, forse anche il povero ronzino legato alla ruota del mulino, chiunque sapesse cosa era giusto. Tutte le creature vengono al mondo con dentro la memoria della giustizia.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Aspettando i barbari

Aspettando i barbari

“Il pragmatismo vince sempre sui principi; è così che vanno le cose, l'universo si muove, la terra cambia sotto i nostri piedi; i principi sono sempre un passo indietro.”

John Maxwell Coetzee

Origine: Da Tempo d'estate.

“Tutte le donne con cui ho avuto una relazione mi hanno insegnato qualcosa di me stesso. In questo senso mi hanno reso migliore.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Vergogna

Vergogna

“… perché siamo qui?
- Non so cosa dire. Siamo qui per lo stesso motivo per cui ci sono tutti gli altri. Abbiamo avuto la possibilità di vivere e l'abbiamo accettata. È una gran cosa vivere. La più grande di tutte.”

John Maxwell Coetzee

“Chi viveva nelle campagne intorno a Treblinka – polacchi, per lo più – diceva di non sapere che cosa accadeva nei campi di sterminio; diceva che, pur intuendo in linea di massima che cosa accadeva, non ne era certo; diceva che, pur sapendo in un certo senso, in un altro senso non sapeva affatto, non poteva permettersi di saperlo per il proprio bene.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro La vita degli animali

Origine: La vita degli animali, p. 28

Frasi sul mondo di John Maxwell Coetzee

“Il libro di Tom Regan [Gabbie vuote] è una bruciante accusa circa il modo in cui trattiamo gli animali in un mondo che abbiamo costruito a nostro completo vantaggio e ci fornisce una disamina definitiva sul fatto che gli animali sono o dovrebbero essere titolari di diritti nello stesso modo in cui lo sono gli umani.”

John Maxwell Coetzee

Origine: Citato in Tom Regan, Gabbie vuote: La sfida dei diritti animali, traduzione di Massimo Filippi e Alessandra Galbiati, Edizioni Sonda, Casale Monferrato, 2005, quarta di copertina. ISBN 88-7106-425-9

“Un bambino ha bisogno del grembo materno per venire al mondo. Una volta che ha lasciato il grembo, la madre come datrice di vita è una forza esaurita, come il padre. Da quel momento in poi il bambino ha bisogno di amore e di cure che possono venire da un uomo come da una donna.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro L'infanzia di Gesù (Coetzee)

The Childhood of Jesus

“Il mondo continua farci delle sorprese. E noi continuiamo a imparare.”

John Maxwell Coetzee

Here and Now: Letters

“Il pentimento appartiene a un altro mondo, a un altro universo concettuale.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Vergogna

Vergogna
Origine: Citato in AA.VV., Il libro della letteratura, traduzione di Daniele Ballarini, Gribaudo, 2019, p. 322. ISBN 9788858024416

John Maxwell Coetzee Frasi e Citazioni

“È stato dai mattatoi di Chicago che i nazisti hanno imparato a lavorare industrialmente i corpi.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro La vita degli animali

Origine: La vita degli animali, pp. 65-66

“Gli orrori quotidiani dell'allevamento intensivo sono raccontati in modo così vivido [in Se niente importa]… che chiunque, dopo aver letto il libro di Foer, continuasse a consumare i prodotti industriali dovrebbe essere senza cuore o senza raziocinio.”

John Maxwell Coetzee

Origine: Citato in Jonathan Safran Foer, Se niente importa: Perché mangiamo gli animali?, traduzione di Irene Abigail Piccinini, Guanda, Parma, 2010<sup>3</sup>, quarta di copertina. ISBN 978-88-6088-113-7

Cuore , Modo

“I rapporti deformati e tarpati tra esseri umani che furono creati sotto il colonialismo e esacerbati sotto quello che è chiamato generalmente apartheid hanno la loro rappresentazione psichica in una vita interiore deforme e tarlata. Tutte le espressioni di questa vita interiore, per quanto intende, per quanto segnate dall'esultanza o dalla disperazione, soffrono delle stesse tarpature e deformità.”

John Maxwell Coetzee

Origine: Citato in Tommaso Giartosio, Perché non possiamo non dirci, Feltrinelli, 2004, p. 158.

Sulla vita , Disperazione

“Niente è peggio di quello che possiamo immaginare.”

John Maxwell Coetzee

Origine: Da Aspettando i barbari.

“Per quello che mi riguarda, direi che è sufficiente che i libri ci insegnino qualcosa su noi stessi. Tutti i lettori dovrebbero accontentarsi di una cosa del genere. O quasi tutti i lettori.”

John Maxwell Coetzee

Origine: Da Elizabeth Costello.

Sui libri

“Vorrei tornare per l'ultima volta ai luoghi di morte che ci circondano, i macelli ai quali noi, in un massiccio sforzo comune, chiudiamo i nostri cuori. Ogni giorno ha luogo un nuovo olocausto, e tuttavia, a quanto vedo, il nostro essere morale non ne viene neppure scalfito.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro La vita degli animali

Origine: La vita degli animali, p. 47

Sulla morte , Sforzo

“Io credo nella pace, forse addirittura nella pace ad ogni costo.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Aspettando i barbari

Aspettando i barbari

Sulla pace

“I bambini non dubitano mai, neppure per un momento, che i vecchi enormi alberi sotto cui giocano dureranno in eterno; che loro cresceranno forti come i loro padri, fertili come le madri, che vivranno e saranno felici e alleveranno a loro volta i propri figli lì dove sono nati.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Aspettando i barbari

Aspettando i barbari

Sui bambini , Albero

“Quando qualcuno soffre ingiustamente […] è destino di coloro che assistono alla sua sofferenza provarne vergogna.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Aspettando i barbari

Aspettando i barbari

Sul destino , Sofferenza

“Il mercato, mi spiegava mia madre, era una macchina cupa e sinistra che stritolava e divorava centinaia di destini per ogni individuo che ricompensava.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Diario di un anno difficile

Diario di un anno difficile

Macchine , Sul destino

“Mentre la guardavo sentii un dolore, un dolore metafisico, insinuarsi in me senza che io facessi niente per fermarlo. E lei, intuitivamente, lo capì, capì che a quel vecchio seduto in un angolo su una sedia di plastica stava succedendo qualcosa di personale, qualcosa che aveva a che fare con l'età e il rimpianto e le lacrime delle cose.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Diario di un anno difficile

Diario di un anno difficile

Sul dolore , Sull'età , Lacrima

“L'aria intorno a noi crepitava letteralmente per una elettricità che non poteva venire da me, poiché io non essudo più correnti, e dunque doveva venire da lei… era semplicemente liberata nell'ambiente… e di nuovo sentii l'ombra di quel dolore passare sopra di me, quel dolore cui alludevo prima, di un genere metafisico o comunque post-fisico.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Diario di un anno difficile

Diario di un anno difficile

Sul dolore

“No, non sono andato da uno psicologo, né intendo andarci. Sono un uomo fatto e finito. Non amo farmi dare consigli. Sono ormai fuori della portata di qualsiasi consiglio.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro Vergogna

Vergogna

“Scrivere è una questione di dare, dare, dare, senza tregua.”

John Maxwell Coetzee

“Chissà perché, pensa, sua madre ha accettato di rispondere alle domande del pubblico. Dovrebbe sapere che le conferenze attirano pazzi e squilibrati come un cadavere attira le mosche.”

John Maxwell Coetzee libro La vita degli animali

Origine: La vita degli animali, p. 48

Domanda , Sugli pazzi

John Maxwell Coetzee: Frasi in inglese

“She no longer believes very strongly in belief… Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro Elizabeth Costello

Elizabeth Costello (2003)

“At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode — he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which — catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended.”

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J.M. Coetzee

Youth (2002)

“Talking to Petrus is like punching a bag of sand.
'Are you giving him up?'
'Yes, I am giving him up.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro Vergogna

Disgrace (1999)

“Sometimes when he is among the sheep — when they have been rounded up to be dipped, and are penned tight and cannot get away — he wants to whisper to them, warn them of what lies in store. But then in their yellow eyes he catches a glimpse of something that silences him: a resignation, a foreknowledge not only of what happens to sheep at the hands of Ros behind the shed, but of what awaits them at the end of their long, thirsty ride to Cape Town on the transport lorry. They know it all, down to the finest detail, and yet they submit. They have calculated the price and are prepared to pay it — the price of being on earth, the price of being alive.”

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J.M. Coetzee

Boyhood (1998)

“Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and the desperate. Around them, guards in olive green uniforms prance with demonic energy and glee, cattle prods and billy-clubs at the ready. They touch the prisoners with the prods and the prisoners leap; they wrestle prisoners to the ground and shove the clubs up their anuses and the prisoners go into spasms. In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs.
One day it will be done, though not by me. It may even be a hit in London and Berlin and New York. It will have absolutely no effect on the people it targets, who could not care less what ballet audiences think of them.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro Diario di un anno difficile

Diary of a Bad Year (2007)

“If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro Diario di un anno difficile

Origine: Diary of a Bad Year (2007), p. 15

“A dictum [Beckett] quotes from his favourite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) suggests his overall stance toward the political: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don’t invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power.”

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J.M. Coetzee

“The Making of Samuel Beckett,” New York Review of Books, vol. LVI, no. 7 (April 30, 2009), p. 13

“Paul here is unhappy because unhappiness is second nature to him but more particularly because he has not the faintest idea of how to bring about his heart's desire. And I am unhappy because nothing is happening. Four people in four corners, moping, like tramps in Beckett, and myself in the middle, wasting time, being wasted by time.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro Slow Man

Slow Man (2004)

“What he dreads is that, during a lull in the conversation, someone will come up with what he calls The Question—“What led you, Mrs. Costello, to become a vegetarian?”—and that she will then get on her high horse and produce what he and Norma call The Plutarch Response. … The response in question comes from Plutarch's moral essays. His mother has it by heart; he can reproduce it only imperfectly. “You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, am astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds.” Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet; after that, there is no knowing what will happen.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro La vita degli animali

Origine: The Lives of Animals (1999), p. 38

“The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka—Poles, for the most part—said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in a general way they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro La vita degli animali

Origine: The Lives of Animals (1999), p. 19

“It was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro La vita degli animali

Origine: The Lives of Animals (1999), p. 53

“Hitherto he has found in Western music, in Bach above all, everything he needs. Now he encounters something that is not in Bach, though there are intimations of it: a joyous yielding of the reasoning, comprehending mind to the dance of the fingers. He hunts through record shops, and in one of them finds an LP of a sitar player named Ustad Vilayat Khan, with his brother — a younger brother, to judge from the picture — on a veena, and an unnamed tabla player. He does not have a gramophone of this own, but he is able to listen to the first ten minutes in the shop. It is all there: the hovering exploration of tone-sequences, the quivering emotion, the ecstatic rushes. He cannot believe his good fortune. A new continent and all for a mere nine shillings! He takes the record back to his room, packs it away between sleeves of cardboard till the day he will able to listen to it again.”

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J.M. Coetzee

Youth (2002)

“But truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro Slow Man

Slow Man (2004)

“The boy is special, Aunt Annie told his mother, and his mother in turn told him. But what kind of special? No one ever says.”

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J.M. Coetzee

Boyhood (1998)

“It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.”

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J.M. Coetzee

“Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry,” Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), p. 94

“Light in tone, the novel [Murphy] is Beckett’s response to the therapeutic orthodoxy that the patient should learn to engage with the larger world on the world’s terms.”

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J.M. Coetzee

“The Making of Samuel Beckett,” New York Review of Books, vol. LVI, no. 7 (April 30, 2009), p. 14

“Do any of us believe in what we are doing here? I doubt it. Her NCO husband least of all. We are given an old racetrack and a quantity of barbed wire and told to effect a change in men's souls. Not being experts on the soul but assuming cautiously that it has some connection with the body, we set our captives to doing pushups and marching back and forth.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro Life & Times of Michael K

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

“The activity of writing, then, is not to be distinguished from the activity of self-exploration. It consists in contemplating the sea of internal images, discerning connections, and setting these out in grammatical sentences (“I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences,” says Murnane, whose views on grammar are firm, even pedantic.)”

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J.M. Coetzee

“The quest for the girl from Bendigo Street,” The New York Review of Books, v. 59. n. 20, December 20, 2012

“Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?”

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J.M. Coetzee libro Slow Man

Slow Man (2004)

““It's been such a short visit, I haven't had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.”
She watches the wipers wagging back and forth. “A better explanation,” she says, “is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.”
“What is it you can't say?”
“It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, ‘Yes, it's nice, isn't it? Polish-Jewish skin it's made of, we find that's best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.’ And then I go to the bathroom and the soap-wrapper says, ‘Treblinka— 100% human stearate.’ Am I dreaming, I say to myself?””

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J.M. Coetzee libro La vita degli animali

Origine: The Lives of Animals (1999), p. 69

“I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched.”

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J.M. Coetzee libro La vita degli animali

Origine: The Lives of Animals (1999), p. 35

“Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.”

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J.M. Coetzee

“Erasmus’s Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness,” Neophilologus 76 (1992), p. 1

“[Being peppered with invitations to travel far and wide to give lectures] has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.”

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J.M. Coetzee

Dagens Nyheter http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee interview with David Attwell (December 8, 2003)

“To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. … It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal-products industry falls short: traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that human beings are capable of?”

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J.M. Coetzee

“ Animals can't speak for themselves - it's up to us to do it! http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/animals-cant-speak-for-themselves--its-up-to-us-to-do-it/2007/02/21/1171733841769.html,” in theage.com.au (February 22, 2007)