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.
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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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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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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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.
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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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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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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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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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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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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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.
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? 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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
NADINE GORDIMER