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Nadine Gordimer
170 quotes
“Strong emotion - faith? - has different ways of being manifested among the different disciples within which people order their behaviour.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conrad went off some evenings for Spanish lessons and sometimes came back with the girl who taught him.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Communists are the last optimists.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The will is my own. The emotion's my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there's no 'we', only 'I'.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The blackman is not fighting for equality with whites. Blackness is the blackman refusing to believe the whiteman's way of life is best for blacks.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The main reason why we're still where we are is blacks haven't united as blacks because we're told all the time to do it is to be racist.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our liberation cannot be divorced from black consciousness because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves -”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the body is no longer an attraction, an expression of desire, to bare your breasts and belly is simple; you lay like dogs or cats grateful for the sun.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But there's no indemnity. You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It'll be enough to take your mind off your stomach. - When lovers cannot touch, they tease each other instead.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“after my first trip out, I realized that “home” was certainly and exclusively—Africa. It could never be anywhere else.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(talking about herself while she was in university) My approach to living as a white supremacist, perforce, among blacks, was, I see now, the humanist approach, the individualistic approach. I felt that all I needed, in my own behavior, was to ignore and defy the color bar. In other words, my own attitude toward blacks seemed to be sufficient action. I didn’t see that it was pretty meaningless until much later.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa. I am dealing with people; here are people who are shaped and changed by politics. In that way my material is profoundly influenced by politics.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there’s a fairly good relationship between black and white writers. Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship, and most white writers feel a strong sense of responsibility to promote, defend, and help black writers where possible.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it was Proust who said that style is the moment of identification between the writer and his situation. Ideally that is what it should be—one allows the situation to dictate the style.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Death is really the mystery of life, isn’t it? If you ask, “What happens when we die? Why do we die?” you are asking, “Why do we live?”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Progress is the business of making life more safe and more enjoyable . . . fuller, generally.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If somebody is partly frivolous or superficial, has moments of cruelty or self-doubt, I don’t write them off, because I think that absolutely everybody has what are known as human failings.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can’t understand writers who feel they shouldn’t have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary; one has got to keep in touch with that. The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner’s or spraying some plants infected with aphids is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would like to say something about how I feel in general about what a novel, or any story, ought to be. It’s a quotation from Kafka. He said, “A book ought to be an ax to break up the frozen sea within us.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The day the cease-fire was signed she was caught in a crowd. Peasant boys from Europe who had made up the colonial army and freedom fighters whose column had marched into town were staggering about together outside the barracks, not three blocks from her house in whose rooms, for ten years, she had heard the blurred parade-ground bellow of colonial troops being trained to kill and be killed.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How to break in: with a name, a statement.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You said: "...and I'm between two girls at the moment.' What exactly had led up to this statement that could have come at any time, that I had been ready for so long I began to forget it would ever come, and that you had been waiting to say for a specific length of time I could not know?”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you live in a small town far from the world you read about in municipal library books, the advent of repair men in the house is a festival. Daily life is gaily broken open, improvisation takes over.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An accolade, one side a white cheek, the other a black. The white one she kissed on the left cheek, the black one on the right, as if these were two sides of one face.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She had not kissed on the mouth, she had not sought anonymous lips and tongues in the licence of festival. Yet she had kissed. Watching herself again, she knew that. She did not tell what happened not because her husband would suspect licence in her.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ugly mansions of the rich who had fled stood empty on the bluff above the sea.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She avoided walking past the barracks because of the machine guns the young sentries had in place of rifles.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Afrikaner farmer—a regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He [the victim] was my friend, I always took him hunting with me”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“city and overseas people”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bad enough to have killed a man,” he believes they will say to themselves, “without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“a moment of high excitement shared through the roof of the cab”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“big, calm, clever son of Willem Van der Vyver”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer—regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando—shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People in the farming community understand how he must feel. Bad enough to have killed a man, without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Odd in-between period which sometimes inserts itself into historical time when not only the later historians but the actors and witnesses, the living themselves, become aware of an interval in time which is altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things that are not yet. In history, these intervals have shown more than once that they may contain the moment of truth.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he isotopy of fragmentation constitutes a unifying web structurally present at the level of story, text, and narration”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“despite the fact that the narrative demonstrates that the voice of the ‘other’ can be heard and imagined, Gordimer’s attitude toward her own whiteness […] is resentful and hostile”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“propos[ed] a future South Africa, not only on terms of equality of races but of sexes, too”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She reminds me of pig. Our ancestors didn't eat pig.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What had Aila done to assuage his anguish at Baby's attempt to end her life before it had begun? Nothing. Silence. Silence upon the other silence. Comfort and understanding he had had to find elsewhere.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was my mother who had talked under interrogation. I know why she did. It was to be sure neither her husband nor I would be held responsible.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Underground: this time, as at other times, he's aware of how unsuitably abstract a term that is. To hide away, you have to be out in the open of life; too soon and easily run to ground, holed up somewhere. Best safety lies in crowds. ("Safe Houses")”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Breathe. Breath. A baby, a chicken hatching-the first imperative is to breathe. Breathless. Breathe! Out of this concentration, in which he forgets even the rhythm of his feet, is a bellows pumped by the command, the admonition, the slap on the bottom that shocks the baby into inhalation-comes his second wind. Unless you go out like this, morning and evening, you never know what no one can remember, that first discovery of independent life: I can breathe. (beginning of "Keeping Fit")”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That night our mother went to the shop and she didn't come back. Ever. What happened? I don't know. (beginning of "The Ultimate Safari")”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the six-year-old daughter of a friend of mine overheard her father telling someone that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize, she asked whether I had ever received it before. He replied that the Prize was something you could get only once. Whereupon the small girl thought a moment: 'Oh' she said, 'so it's like chicken-pox.'”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source