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 GORDIMERIt’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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
NADINE GORDIMER -
in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
NADINE GORDIMER -
As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER