Top 100 Nadine Gordimer Quotes
#2. It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
Nadine Gordimer
#3. I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.
Nadine Gordimer
#4. you like to have some cup of tea?-July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind.
Nadine Gordimer
#5. The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
Nadine Gordimer
#6. I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
Nadine Gordimer
#7. In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
Nadine Gordimer
#9. You don't have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there's a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.
Nadine Gordimer
#11. I'm forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
Nadine Gordimer
#12. Equality was not freedom, it had only been the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom.
Nadine Gordimer
#14. To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?
Nadine Gordimer
#15. Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.
Nadine Gordimer
#16. It's impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
Nadine Gordimer
#17. With an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.
Nadine Gordimer
#18. The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.
Nadine Gordimer
#19. At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky.
Nadine Gordimer
#20. About the joys and the courage, I really don't know what other people think. I just know that I've never left Africa. I've lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.
Nadine Gordimer
#21. But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another.
Nadine Gordimer
#22. Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
Nadine Gordimer
#23. What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
Nadine Gordimer
#25. Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
Nadine Gordimer
#26. Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
Nadine Gordimer
#27. The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
Nadine Gordimer
#28. Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity
Nadine Gordimer
#30. Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white's front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
Nadine Gordimer
#31. Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
Nadine Gordimer
#32. You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.
Nadine Gordimer
#33. If you ask, 'What happens when we die? Why do we die?' you are asking, 'Why do we live?
Nadine Gordimer
#34. The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
Nadine Gordimer
#35. Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
Nadine Gordimer
#36. That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology ... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins.
Nadine Gordimer
#37. I'm an atheist. I wouldn't even call myself an agnostic. I am an atheist.
Nadine Gordimer
#38. Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
Nadine Gordimer
#40. I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.
Nadine Gordimer
#41. I don't think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
Nadine Gordimer
#43. People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
Nadine Gordimer
#44. Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
Nadine Gordimer
#45. That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine.
Nadine Gordimer
#46. If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
Nadine Gordimer
#47. It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women-a new job, a new town, a divorce-which really shape them ... but a long slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative ...
Nadine Gordimer
#48. The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can't believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
Nadine Gordimer
#49. Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
Nadine Gordimer
#51. Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships.
Nadine Gordimer
#52. They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space
atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time.
Nadine Gordimer
#53. Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.
Nadine Gordimer
#54. The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
Nadine Gordimer
#55. Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
Nadine Gordimer
#56. The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
Nadine Gordimer
#58. Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
Nadine Gordimer
#59. I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.
Nadine Gordimer
#60. The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
Nadine Gordimer
#61. It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
Nadine Gordimer
#62. If you live in Europe ... things change ... but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.
Nadine Gordimer
#64. Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
Nadine Gordimer
#66. Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
Nadine Gordimer
#67. If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa
Nadine Gordimer
#68. I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
Nadine Gordimer
#69. It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
Nadine Gordimer
#70. The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.
Nadine Gordimer
#71. Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter.
Nadine Gordimer
#72. A writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing - he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
Nadine Gordimer
#73. Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
Nadine Gordimer
#76. A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
Nadine Gordimer
#79. All worthwhile writing ... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
Nadine Gordimer
#80. If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.
Nadine Gordimer
#81. In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together.
Nadine Gordimer
#82. Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
Nadine Gordimer
#83. One can't measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
Nadine Gordimer
#85. When it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
Nadine Gordimer
#86. Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
Nadine Gordimer
#87. I never talk about what I'm writing about currently, never. It's private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
Nadine Gordimer
#88. Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
Nadine Gordimer
#90. You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
Nadine Gordimer
#92. Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.
Nadine Gordimer
#93. Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
Nadine Gordimer
#94. In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
Nadine Gordimer
#95. Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
Nadine Gordimer
#96. Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
Nadine Gordimer
#97. I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
Nadine Gordimer
#98. I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
Nadine Gordimer
#100. From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
Nadine Gordimer
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