Gordimer Quotes
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Gordimer Quotes & Sayings
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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
— Nadine Gordimer
I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
— Nadine Gordimer
Music has no limits of a life-span.
— Nadine Gordimer
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
Her work sought to challenge all of us critically to reflect on the things we find comfort in believing without question.
— Thabo Mbeki
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
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
You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
— Nadine Gordimer
I opened the telegram and said, 'He's dead.
— Nadine Gordimer
I'm happy to be a card-carrying member of the ANC.
— Nadine Gordimer
In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
— Nadine Gordimer
Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
— Nadine Gordimer
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
Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter.
— Nadine Gordimer
Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
— Nadine Gordimer
Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
— Nadine Gordimer
Books don't need batteries.
— Nadine Gordimer
Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
— Nadine Gordimer
The creative act is not pure.
— Nadine Gordimer
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
— Nadine Gordimer
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
My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
— Nadine Gordimer
From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
— Nadine Gordimer
Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?
— Nadine Gordimer
How did I find out? I was deceiving him.
— Nadine Gordimer
Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.
— Nadine Gordimer
I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
— Nadine Gordimer
One can't measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
— Nadine Gordimer
Communists are the last optimists.
— Nadine Gordimer
I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
— Nadine Gordimer
Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
— Nadine Gordimer
Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.
— Christopher Hitchens
Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
— Nadine Gordimer
Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
— Nadine Gordimer
I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.
— Nadine Gordimer
Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
— Nadine Gordimer
Writing is making sense of life.
— Nadine Gordimer
A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
— Nadine Gordimer
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
At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky.
— Nadine Gordimer
I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.
— Nadine Gordimer
The facts are always less than what really happened.
— Nadine Gordimer
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
The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
— Nadine Gordimer
The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.
— Nadine Gordimer
In writing, sex doesn't matter; it's the writing that matters.
— Nadine Gordimer
Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
— Nadine Gordimer
A desert is a place without expectation.
— Nadine Gordimer
The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.
— Nadine Gordimer
Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
— Nadine Gordimer
If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa
— Nadine Gordimer
If you ask, 'What happens when we die? Why do we die?' you are asking, 'Why do we live?
— Nadine Gordimer
There's no tiling moral about beauty.
— Nadine Gordimer
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
— Nadine Gordimer
Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
— Nadine Gordimer
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
— Nadine Gordimer
Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
— Nadine Gordimer
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
Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
— Nadine Gordimer
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
— Nadine Gordimer
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
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity
— Nadine Gordimer
A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
— Nadine Gordimer
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
— Nadine Gordimer
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
If you live in Europe ... things change ... but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.
— Nadine Gordimer
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
— Nadine Gordimer
Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
— Nadine Gordimer
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
— Nadine Gordimer
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
When it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
— Nadine Gordimer
People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
— Nadine Gordimer
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
— Nadine Gordimer
When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
— Nadine Gordimer
Death's the discarder.
— Nadine Gordimer
I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.
— Nadine Gordimer
Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
— Nadine Gordimer
