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.
NADINE GORDIMERI decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Writing is making sense of life.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
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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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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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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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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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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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.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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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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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
NADINE GORDIMER