Chop

“A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Summertime

“We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Foe

“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians