The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
NADINE GORDIMERIf you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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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.
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Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
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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.
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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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In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
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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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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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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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Books dont need batteries
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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