Nadine Gordimer Quotes

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

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

Communists are the last optimists. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

I opened the telegram and said, 'He's dead. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

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

I don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that ... The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is. ~ Nadine Gordimer

One can't measure how a mood of confidence comes about. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. ~ 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

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

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

I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country. ~ Nadine Gordimer

The creative act is not pure. ~ 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

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

Writing is making sense of life. ~ 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

There was one of those sunsets beginning - the kind we've been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We've never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It's everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it's from atomic tests; but it's said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution. ~ Nadine Gordimer

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

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

In a democracy - even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-?litist one - the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

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

Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. ~ Nadine Gordimer

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Books don't need batteries. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I'm happy to be a card-carrying member of the ANC. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self ~ 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

People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I don't want to know more about her; don't want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it's not her fault. --One is married and there is nothing to be done.-- Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It's other things he's said that are the text I'm living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There's nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other....

'This is the creature that has never been'--he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis inventé. ~ 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

I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that. ~ Nadine Gordimer

What it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold. ~ Nadine Gordimer

All worthwhile writing ... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued. ~ 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

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

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it's as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away. ~ Nadine Gordimer

What a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself. ~ Nadine Gordimer

How did I find out? I was deceiving him. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I'm forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs. ~ Nadine Gordimer

The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison. ~ Nadine Gordimer

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be. ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

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

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

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

Newspapers are horror happening to other people. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

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

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be. ~ 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

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I'm asking you, it happens to interest me, is to kill the only sin we recognize.

It's the ultimate, isn't it. Is that what you mean.

No I don't.

Lies, theft, false witness, betrayal –

Go on. Adultery, blasphemy, you believe in sin. I don't think I do. I just believe in damage; don't damage. That's what [Duncan] was taught, that's what he knows – knew. So now – is to take life the only sin recognized by people like me? Unbelievers. Not like you.

Of course it's not. I've said: it's the ultimate. Nothing more terrible.

Before God. She pushes him.

Before God and man. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability. ~ Nadine Gordimer

The pirogues came with live turtles, and with fish, with cloudy beer and wine made from bananas, palm nuts, or sorghum, and with the smoked meat of hippopotamus and crocodile. The vendors did a good trade with our crew and the passengers down at the third-class boat; the laughter, the exclamations, and the argument of bargaining were with us all day, heard but not understood, like voices in the next room. At stopping places, the people who were nourished on these ingredients of a witches' brew poured ashore across the single plank flung down for them, very human in contour, the flesh of the children sweet, the men and women strong and sometimes handsome. We, thank God, were fed on veal and ham and Brussels sprouts, brought frozen from Europe. ~ Nadine Gordimer

In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I'll go back. I'll go back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and he'll be there. They'll be home, and I'll remember them. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Writing is always a voyage of discovery. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it? ~ Nadine Gordimer

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch. ~ Adam Gopnik

Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature ~ Nadine Gordimer

A desert is a place without expectation. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa ~ Nadine Gordimer

There's no tiling moral about beauty. ~ Nadine Gordimer

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

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that ... you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Because someday, Parvin Blackwater, I want you to marry me. ~ Nadine Brandes

A whisper loud enough to rise above the world's roar. That is my God. Working through us flawed, impulsive humans. ~ Nadine Brandes

They had something worth dying for. Ah, but you have something they don't.
And what's that?
Something worth living for. ~ Nadine Brandes

Karma is a bitch handsome, and her name is Natalia. ~ Heather Nadine Lenz

But labels, names, or skin colour don't matter ... we're children of Christ. ~ Nadine Brandes

The Claudias also need laughter and play, they need people who will celebrate life with them and manifest their joy of being with them. It was this joy and the gentle presence of Nadine and the others in Suyapa that gradually weakened Claudia's great walls of defence. Little by little, she began to trust that she was not bad, but capable of loving and being loved. ~ Jean Vanier

Isn't that the tragedy of growing up though? One day you wake up and realize that everything you are and everything you feel is not much different from what everyone else feels. ~ Nadine Rose Larter

I simply wanted to get through college as quickly as humanly possible. I had no interest in extracurricular activities or anything that required me to be social. I was allergic to people. ~ Nadine Velazquez