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Nadine Gordimer

170 quotes

“We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty. These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as 'overseas'.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuation, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues. The word flies through space, it is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like the prisoners incarcerated with the jaguar in Borges' story, 'The God's Script', who was trying to read, in a ray of light which fell only once a day, the meaning of being from the marking on the creature's pelt, we spend our lives attempting to interpret through the word the readings we take in the societies, the world of which we are part. It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation, death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun and moon, plenty and disaster. With myth, the writer's ancestors, the oral story-tellers, began to feel out and formulate these mysteries, using the elements of daily life — observable reality — and the faculty of the imagination — the power of projection into the hidden — to make stories.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Myth was the mystery plus the fantasy — gods, anthropomorphized animals and birds, chimera, phantasmagorical creatures — that posits out of the imagination some sort of explanation for the mystery. Humans and their fellow creatures were the materiality of the story, but as Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote, 'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.'”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps it is the positive knowledge that humans now possess the means to destroy their whole planet, the fear that they have in this way themselves become the gods, dreadfully charged with their own continued existence, that has made comic-book and movie myth escapist.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The forces of being remain. They are what the writer, as distinct from the contemporary popular mythmaker, still engage today, as myth in its ancient form attempted to do.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The writer in relation to the nature of perceivable reality and what is beyond — imperceivable reality — is the basis for all these studies, no matter what resulting concepts are labelled, and no matter in what categorized microfiles writers are stowed away for the annals of literary historiography. Reality is constructed out of many elements and entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and left unexpressed for breathing-space in the mind.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books . . . But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Both Borges and Sartre, from their totally different extremes of denying literature a social purpose, were certainly perfectly aware that it has its implicit and unalterable social role in exploring the state of being, from which all other roles, personal among friends, public at the protest demonstration, derive. Borges was not writing for his friends, for he published and we all have received the bounty of his work. Sartre did not stop writing, although he stood at the barricades in 1968.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being here: in a particular time and place. That is the existential position with particular implications for literature.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. If something happens where I live, you see it tomorrow or perhaps even at the same time it is happening there. It's not "one world" in the sense that conflicts are resolved in the world. But we are more one world in that we know what is going on and are psychologically influenced by what goes on around us.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“for country people, things are as they were. They are very remote, very poor, very dependent on the white farmers they work for. It's very difficult to organize them. There are still huge, huge problems to be tackled.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. They continue to love, to laugh, to get pleasure out of life.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This idea that revolutionaries are martyrs who go around looking gloomy and noble, this is a romantic idea for people who've never met anybody who's gone through the experiences.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“to me this is what fiction is about; it asks questions, and it doesn't answer.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The real influence of the events in the Soviet Union was to spread a lot of unease and anxiety in the African National Congress, because the Soviet Union had been the only country, really, that had stood by us all those years. The West never lifted a finger or gave a cent to the African National Congress. America, England, Germany-everyone supported the South African government against the attempts of the African National Congress to bring about change.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...a swarthy man (Italian or jew?) with a scarred grin, and eyes, one dark-brilliant, one blurred blind, from whom radiant vitality comes impudently since he is gesticulating with a stump in place of one arm.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The purpose of life is to defend the body against the violence of pain.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That kind of act isn’t in the range of emotional control in which their son’s character was formed, or the contemporary ethic that men don’t own women. Therefore the act could not have been committed.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not met me. She doesn’t do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have the feeling you’re in some way suspicious of me. You’re trying to … get me to explain, because I’m his mother. I ought to know, I should know why. And I’m his mother. I ought to know!”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever happens to him, whatever he has done … he can come to us. There’s nothing you cannot tell us. We’re always there for you. Always.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Duncan found her and took her to hospital. He brought her back to life. Literally. She owes her life to Duncan; or she blames him.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Discovery is not an end. Only a new mystery.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Two creatures caught in the headlights of catastrophe. Nothing between Duncan and the judge, passing sentence, but Motsamai and his confidence.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh dear, I’m sorry, Bra[brother] and Duncan remembers that “it was exactly the manner, the words, with which the man had announced the end of the months they had lived as lovers.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Had not been able to tell them anything that was leading him towards that Friday night when something terrible happened to him.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...in whom self-control has been strongly established since childhood”, and that the evening of the murder was no exception.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...cannot distinguish which Duncan is being described in truth.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not in his nature. Never. I swear on my own life.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Disgust, a disintegration of everything.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suddenly picked up the gun on the table. And then he was quiet.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether or not harmful intention was premeditated, when the accused picked up the gun … was he in a state of automatism in which … there was total loss of control?”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bring death and life together.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Clustered predators round a kill. It's a small car with a young woman inside it. The battery has failed and taxis, cars, minibuses, vans, motorcycles butt and challenge one another, reproach and curse her, a traffic mob mounting its own confusion. Get going. Stupid bloody woman. Idikazana lomlungu, le! She throws up hands, palms open, in surrender. They continue to jostle and blare their impatience. She gets out of her car and faces them. (first lines)”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine. (p144)”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity. (p252)”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To me, writing, from the very beginning and right until this day, is a voyage of discovery. Of the mystery of life. I am one of those people who have no religious faith, I am an atheist. I believe there is only this life. But this life is so incredible.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth can only be pieced together from these different bits of knowledge, these different impressions, these different experiences. Goethe said: “You close your eyes and you dip your hand into your society and you bring up a little bit of the truth.” And that is the material of your writing.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m beginning now even to see it in my own books which are written from many different points of view, very different personae, first person as a man, a child, a woman, a young person, an older person, there is the sense, looking back, that you are really writing one book all your life. Because there is this voyage of discovery of life.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is more truth in my fiction than in nonfiction. I think, subconsciously, [if] I am writing an article or talking to you, there is a certain amount of self-censorship going on. But in my fiction I am writing as if I were dead. I want to say it all. I want to say everything I know.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source