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Nadine Gordimer
170 quotes
“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Leaving School—II", The London Magazine (May 1963)
“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 Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Great Problems in the Street," in I Will Still Be Moved (1963) ed. by Marion Friedmann
“I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead —" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Late Bourgeois World (1966) (first lines)
“Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn’t make the world over if it were to be as easy as that.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Conservationist (1974)
“I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it. (1979)”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1979 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)
“I think that the decision to be sincere is an artistic one.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1982 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)
“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Jannika Hurwitt, published in Paris Review, 88 (Summer 1983) 82–127; reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Sixth Series (1984) (the interview took place in two parts: fall 1979/spring…
“Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society…A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implication and he is politically committed. (1983)”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1983 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)
“In countries like Czechoslovakia, like South Africa, like Argentina, guilt by association is a fact and therefore the friendships you form can be a political act. This circumstance, way of life, is very complex. People think that a political act is signing a declaration or planting a bomb, but there are all kinds of political acts in countries where there is a great political struggle going on.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1983 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer
“I think that as long as those of us in South Africa who are articulate are asked to go abroad, and we know we are going to be interviewed, we cannot refuse. There are so many people in South Africa, within the country, who are muzzled. And there are others who may not be muzzled within South Africa but whose passports are withdrawn, people like Bishop Desmond Tutu-a very important voice; you know, a writer is nothing compared with him. He is a big figure, a real leader, and he can't go abroad and speak. So I think that those of us who can, as long as we can, we have to use the opportunity.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1984 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)
“Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Essential Gesture" (12 October 1984)
“There was no mistaking her. She was a young woman whose cultivated gentleness of expression and shabby homespun style of dress, in the context in which she was encountered, suggested not transcendental meditation centre or environmental concern group or design studio, but a sign of identification with the humanity of those who had nothing and risked themselves.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Crimes of Conscience", collected in Something Out There (1984)
“'Even the cat buries its dirt; I carry mine around with me.' She thought of saying it aloud many times in the weeks after she came home from the hospital.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: first lines of "Terminal", collected in Something Out There (1984)
“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.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1985) ed. Sterling McMurrin
“In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: None to Accompany Me (1994)
“Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The House Gun (1997)
“What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The House Gun (1997)
“You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'A feeling of realistic optimism': An interview with Nadine Gordimer" by Karen Lazar, Salmagundi 113 (Winter 1997)
“I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The conscience of South Africa talks about her country's new racial order" (1998) by Dwight Garner
“Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The conscience of South Africa talks about her country's new racial order" (1998) by Dwight Garner
“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.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The conscience of South Africa talks about her country's new racial order" (1998) by Dwight Garner
“Can there be the phenomenon of a world state of mind?”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fear Eats the Soul" (2003), included in Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 (2010)
“time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nadine Gordimer "Fear Eats the Soul" (2003)
“Fear. It's unacknowledged; shared by friend and foe if nothing else is.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fear Eats the Soul" (2003)
“Dangers are relative, over time and distance; fear is relative, whether it menaces a multitude or a single life, but it always demands the same answers: a yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition, fear that eats the soul.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fear Eats the Soul" (2003)
“Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Get a Life (2005)
“There are two kinds of leaders in the species humankind. There is the man or woman of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman who creates a self out of response to people's needs, the call of conscience against oppression, injustice, and sufferings of any nature within our human condition. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other it is a charge of energy which comes in others needs and the demands these make on all of us who share humanity. Conscience is a form of solidarity.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: speech (2006)
“The question mark remains. It hangs over peace negotiations - that vital base for the answer an outsider who believes in justice surely must support: two fully independent states on agreed, realistic frontiers.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: about Israel and Palestine. "Experiencing Two Absolutes" (2008), included in Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 (2010)
“Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No Time Like the Present (2010)
“No globalisation without a human face.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Letter to Future Generations (1999), included in Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 (2010)
“There can be no global culture while there are inhabitants deprived of the ability to read, to have access to the powers of the imagination released through the written word, through literature; deprived of the intellectual and spiritual bounty of libraries.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Letter to Future Generations (1999)
“Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer nights. A tourist could be fooled. Africa already; at last, even though he went to bed in yet another metropole.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just before light, when it's supposed to be darkest, the body's at its lowest ebb and in the hospital on the hill old people die the night opens, a Black hole between stars, and from it comes a deep panting. Very distant and at once very close, right in the year, for the sound of breath is always intimate.It grows and gorws, a rising groan lifs out of the curved bars of the cage and hangs above the whole city -- And then it drops back, sinks away, becomes panting again.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wait for it; it will fall so quiet, hardly more than a faint roughness snagging the air in the ear's chambers. ... And begins once more. The panting reaches up up up down down down to that awe-ful groan!”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The zoo lions do no utter during the day. They yawn; wait for their ready-slaughtered kill to be tossed at them; keep their unused claws sheathed in huge harmless pads on which top-heavy, untidy heads rest,... gazing through lid-slats with what zoo visitors think of in sentimental prurience as yearning.Or once we were near the Baltic and the leviathan hooted from the night fog at sea. But would I dare to open my mouth now? Could I trust my breath to be sweet, these stale nights?”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one can say what it was the white soldier said over the telephone to his commanding officer, and if the commanding officer had told him what was going to be done, or whether the white soldier knew, as a matter of procedure laid down in his military training for this kind of war, what would be done. The police found the bicycle beneath his dangling shoes. So the family hanger-on still rides it; it would have been lost if it had been safe in the kitchen when the raid came. No one knows where the chief found a rope, in the ruins of the village.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The train came out of the red horizon and bore down towards them over the single straight track.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Between its vandyke teeth, in the mouth opened in a roar too terrible to be heard, it had a black tongue.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I should have given it up long ago if it had not been for her.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Out in the country, even ten miles out, life is better than that.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And for a moment I accept the triumph as I had managed it.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension,’ they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a [B]lack man won’t stand aside for a white man.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle. (First lines)”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Flora pretended to cuddle me against the cold, but I didn't need her kind of emotional excitation. She talked about 'the girls' in there, and my mother was one of them.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For nearly thirty years the Communist Party allied itself as a legal organization with the African struggle for black rights and the extension of the franchise to the black majority.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source