Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
NADINE GORDIMERIt was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
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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.
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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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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.
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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.
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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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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.
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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.
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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.
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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.
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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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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