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 GORDIMERThe 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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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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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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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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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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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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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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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
NADINE GORDIMER