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"Elizabeth Costello" Quotes
"Elizabeth Costello" by J.M. Coetzee explores the life and thoughts of an aging Australian novelist as she grapples with complex philosophical and ethical questions through a series of lectures and personal reflections.
Quotes
There is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another.
Realism, by which I mean a particular kind of realism, takes as its premise that the world is what it is and is not otherwise.
To be alive is to be a living soul. An animal, a bird, a tree are alive because they are souls.
As for being the animal, I can only imagine it. I will never know what it is like to be a bat.
A book is a message in a bottle, cast into the ocean on the chance that it may wash up somewhere, someday, on some hospitable shore.
The world is full of stories that can be told and retold until they become part of the fabric of our lives.
We live in a world of appearances, of illusion, of layers, and we navigate it as best we can with the tools we have.
Language is not merely a tool; it is a way of seeing, of experiencing the world.
There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination.
We must speak, and we must speak as best we can, even if we know we are speaking into a void.
