A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
NADINE GORDIMERA child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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it’s impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren’t taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
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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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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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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 learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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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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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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It’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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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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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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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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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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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A desert is a place without expectation.
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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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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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.
NADINE GORDIMER