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"I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world."
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"The job description, like most, used complicated words that made job-hopefuls hesitant to apply because it may be out of their range of capability."
"We are so used to working that not working is the new hard work."
"And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain."
"A salary is a tax employers pay, every four weeks, for putting an employee's dream on hold."
"Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain."
"Work is a vehicle with which man chases some fleeting destination called a full tummy."
"To some women, a job plays the role of a man. To most women, a man plays the role of a job."
"A specialist's mind is a slave to his specialization."
"When I worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, we would routinely be engulfed in cold clouds of helium and nitrogen gas as we discharged it into the video camera systems daily. The management team never warned us that we were in a hazardous oxygen deprived environment during this activity that was known for its ability to adversely affect physical and mental health, and possibly bring on death by asphyxiation."
Explore more quotes by J. M. Coetzee
"My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms."
"If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart."
"The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role."
"The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law."
"Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?"
"The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint."
"If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?"
"I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African."
"The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness."
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