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.
NADINE GORDIMERA truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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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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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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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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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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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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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Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
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Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
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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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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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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 tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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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 caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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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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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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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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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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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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