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 GORDIMERYour 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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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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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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.
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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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
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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.
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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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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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Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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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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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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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.
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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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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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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
NADINE GORDIMER