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 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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When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
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Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
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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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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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 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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Communists are the last optimists.
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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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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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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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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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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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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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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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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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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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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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Books dont need batteries
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER