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 GORDIMERIf one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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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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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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Writing is making sense of life.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Books dont need batteries
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Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
NADINE GORDIMER