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 GORDIMERIf 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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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.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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 -
Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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.
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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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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.
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The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
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If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
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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.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
NADINE GORDIMER