Nadine Gordimer Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Power, Sides, Innocence

  Nadine Gordimer (1956). “Six Feet of the Country: Fifteen Short Stories”

  18 Copy quote

• Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Single Life, Fiction, Way

  Nadine Gordimer (1983). “Selected Stories”, Viking Press

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• 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

  Taken, Loss, Preparation

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Burger's Daughter”, p.9, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• 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

  Survival, Events, Different

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “July's People”, p.7, A&C Black

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• 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

  Humanity, Faces, Slave

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Loot”, p.12, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• One can't measure how a mood of confidence comes about.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Mood

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.155, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• 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

  Children, Differences, Television

  Source: www.progressive.org

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Mean, Doors

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008”, p.277, A&C Black

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• Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Church, Entering, Crosses

  Nadine Gordimer (2011). “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008”, p.425, A&C Black

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• Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Fall, Writing, Way

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008”, p.119, A&C Black

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• There's no tiling moral about beauty.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Beauty, Moral

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• Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Creativity, Responsibility, Eden

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008”, p.409, A&C Black

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• If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Commitment, Years, Political

  Source: progressive.org

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• Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.

  Nadine Gordimer

  People, Feels

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Mystery, Existence, Exploring

  "Warrior of the Imagination". Academy of Achievement interview, www.achievement.org. November 11, 2009.

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• I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn't speak publicly.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Government, Television, Speak

  Source: progressive.org

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• 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

  Power, Men, Enemy Of Progress

  28 Copy quote

• 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

  Party, Believe, People

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• 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

  Genius, Censorship, Fragments

  Nadine Gordimer (2011). “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008”, p.411, A&C Black

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• The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Beautiful, Country, Travel

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “A World of Strangers”, p.45, A&C Black

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• 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

  Writing, Eden, Creative

  "The Tanner Lectures on Human Values". Book edited by Sterling McMurrin, 1980.

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• Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Art, Writing, Understanding

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Living in Hope and History”, p.199, A&C Black

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• when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Essentials, Faculty, Androgynous

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.153, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Drama, Writing, Mean

  "Nadine Gordimer on dividing fact from fiction" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. November 8, 2010.

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