The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
NADINE GORDIMERResponsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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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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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
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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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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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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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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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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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
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I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
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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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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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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Communists are the last optimists.
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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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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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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
NADINE GORDIMER