Quotes from Waiting for the Barbarians

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

“You think you know what is just and what is not. I understand. We all think we know." I had no doubt, myself, then, that at each moment each one of us, man, woman, child, perhaps even the poor old horse turning the mill-wheel, knew what was just: all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice. "But we live in a world of laws," I said to my poor prisoner, "a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished. No one can accept that an imperial has been annihilated by men with bows and arrows and rusty old guns who live in tents and never wash and cannot read or write. And who am I to jeer at life-giving illusions? Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise?”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“الألم هو الحقيقة ، وما سواه يخضع للشك.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“The jackal rips out the hare's bowels, but the world rolls on.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“Space is space,life is life,everywhere is the same. But as for me, sustained by the toil of others, lacking civilized vices with which to fill my leisure, I pamper my melancholy and try to find in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy. Vain, idle, misguided! How fortunate that no one sees me!”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“...from the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“حقاً ان الانسان لم يخلق كي يعيش وحيداً”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“Schmerz ist Wahrheit; alles andere wird angezweifelt.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover—I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her—but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“أمور مخيفة تجري في الليل، بينما أنت وأنا نائمين، الثعلب يسرق أحشاء الأرنب، ولكن العالم يستمر في الدوران”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“أي طير يملك قلبا ليغني في أيكة من الأشواك ؟”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“الجريمة الكامنة في دواخلنا، يتوجب علينا إنزالها على أنفسنا، وليس على آخرين”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice. "But we live in a world of laws," I said to my poor prisoner, "a world of the second best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“لقد آمنت طوال حياتي بالسلوك المتحضر، وفي هذه المناسبة، لاأستطيع أن أنكر أن الذاكرة تتركني مشمئزا من نفسي”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“أناضل أنا مع القصة القديمة، آملا أنها قبل أن تنتهي، ستكشف لي عن السبب الذي جعلني أظن أنها جديرة بالعناء”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“متى سأتعلم أن أمسك بلسان ماكر؟”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“All that I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to the grave by old friends.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“From the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

“Calf-deep in the soothing water I indulge myself in the wishful vision. I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish. Without exception they are dreams of ends: dreams not of how to live but of how to die. And everyone, I know, in that walled town sinking now into darkness (I hear the two thin trumpet calls that announce the closing of the gates) is similarly preoccupied. What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in the water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or if not his then his son's or unborn grandson's) to climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant that symbolizes eternal domination, while his comrades below cheer and fire their muskets in the air.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Waiting for the Barbarians

About the author

Popular quotes

“As for the age of electronics, Selena, I really don't want to get personal with something that comes with a warning label and batteries. (Grace)”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Fantasy Lover

“There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from The Pact

“Tell them that our lives can change with every breath we take. Lord, we both know that. Tell them to let go of what's gone because men like roger Briscoe never win. And tell them to hold on like hell to what they've got- each other, and a mother who would die for them, and almost did.”
― Billie Letts, quote from Where the Heart Is

“Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music

“I often cried when I got angry; I hated that. Crying just made you look weak, no matter what triggered it.”
― Charlaine Harris, quote from All Together Dead

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.