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.
NADINE GORDIMERTime is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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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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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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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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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.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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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.
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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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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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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
NADINE GORDIMER