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View Plans“ ”Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating the desired that language masters it. The frenzy of desire in the medium of words yields the mania of the catalogue. I struggle with the proverbs of hell.
About J.M. Coetzee
John Maxwell Coetzee (born 9 February 1940), often called J. M. Coetzee, is a South African-born writer and academic. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He now lives in Australia.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Shorter versions of this quote
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
Additional quotes by J.M. Coetzee
If only we could eat our sunsets, I say, we would all be full.
There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.
What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out.