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Nadine Gordimer

170 quotes

“Do we ever live really in the present? I don’t think so, not entirely, do you?...There are always intrusions, sometimes welcome, sometimes not, from the past.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writers don’t only listen, they also look. Though, indeed, they do listen. I started being an eavesdropper when I was a child, picking up unexplained little bits of conversation and imagining what led to that, what drama in that couple’s life, or what happened between that child and the parent when I overheard: “Stop that! You’re being very naughty.” You know, what does it all mean?”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a writer, I'm a composite intelligence.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Television and newspapers show people's lives at a certain point. But novels tell you what happened after the riot, what happened when everybody went home.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Music has no limits of a life-span.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A desert is a place without expectation.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Death's the discarder.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's only on warm summer nights that the lions are restless. What they're seeing when they gaze during the day is nothing, their eyes are open but they don't see us -you can tell that when the lens of the pupil suddenlys shutters at the close swoop0 of one of the popcorn-begging pigeons through the bars of the cage. ... It's only on certain nights that their muscles flex and they begin to pant,their flanks heave as if they had been running through the dark night while other creatures shrank from their path, their jaws hang tense and wet as saliva flows as if in response to a scent of prey, at last they heave up their too-big heads, heavy, heavy heads, and out it comes. Out over the suburbs. A dreadful straining of the bowels to deliver itself; a groan that hangs above the houses in a low-lying cloud of smog and anguish.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The young man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places. The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring. Pouring, pouring. She sat there, sick. A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp. She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.She sat there not wanting to move or speak, or to look at anything even; so that the mood should be associated with nothing, no object, word, or sight that might recur and so recall the feeling again….Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner.The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was Sinclair's The Jungle that really started me thinking about politics: I thought, good God, these people who are exploited in a meat-packing factory-they're just like blacks here. And the whole idea that people came to America, not knowing the language, having to struggle in sweat shops. . . I didn't relate this to my own father, because my father was bourgeois by then... but I related it to the blacks. Again, what a paradox that South Africa was the blacks' own country, but they were recruited just as if they had been migrant workers for the mines. So I saw the analogy. And that was the beginning of my thinking about my position vis-à-vis blacks. But though I didn't know anything-I was twelve or thirteen, and leading the odd kind of life I did, living in books-I began to think about these things before, perhaps, I was ready for them. When I got to university, it was through mixing with other people who were writing or painting that I got to know black people as equals. In a general and inclusive, non-racial way, I met people who lived in the world of ideas, in the world that interested me passionately. In the town where I lived, there was no mental food of this kind at all. I’m often amazed to think how they live, those people, and what an oppressed life it must be, because human beings must live in the world of ideas. This dimension in the human psyche is very important. It was there, but they didn’t know how to express it.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“in Burger’s Daughter, you could say on the face of it that it’s a book about white communists in South Africa. But to me, it’s something else. It’s a book about commitment. Commitment is not merely a political thing. It’s part of the whole ontological problem in life. It’s part of my feeling that what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that’s what writing is, I think that’s what painting is. It’s seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There were two soldiers in front of her, blocking her off by their clumsy embrace(how do you do it, how do you do what you've never done before) and the embrace opened like a door and took her in -- a pink hand with bitten nails grasping her right arm, a black hand with a big-dialled watch and thong bracelet pulling at her left elbow. Their three heads collided gaily, musk of sweat and tang of strong sweet soap clapped a mask to her nose and mouth. They all gasped with delicious shock. She put up an arm around each neck, the rough pile of an army haircut on one side, the soft negro hair on the other, and kissed them both on the cheek. The embrace broke.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are many proven explanations for natural phenomena now; and there are new questions of being arising out of some of the answers. For this reason, the genre of myth has never been entirely abandoned, although we are inclined to think of it as archaic. If it dwindled to the children's bedtime tale in some societies, in parts of the world protected by forests or deserts from international megaculture it has continued, alive, to offer art as a system of mediation between the individual and being. And it has made a whirling comeback out of Space, an Icarus in the avatar of Batman and his kind, who never fall into the ocean of failure to deal with the gravity forces of life.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses — the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With adolescence comes the first reaching out to otherness through the drive of sexuality. For most children, from then on the faculty of the imagination, manifest in play, is lost in the focus on day dreams of desire and love, but for those who are going to be artists of one kind or another the first life-crisis after that of birth does something else in addition: the imagination gains range and extends by the subjective flex of new and turbulent emotions. There are new perceptions. The writer begins to be able to enter into other lives. The process of standing apart and being involved has come.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Camus dealt with the question best. He said that he liked individuals who take sides more than literatures that do. 'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.' So Camus called for 'Courage in and talent in one's work.' And Márquez redefined tender fiction thus: The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can. I believe that these two statements might be the credo for all of us who write. They do not resolve the conflicts that have come, and will continue to come, to contemporary writers. But they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of the writer squarely to her and his existence, the reason to be, as a writer, and the reason to be, as a responsible human, acting, like any other, within a social context.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer's themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art: trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs.”
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) said by 2014 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source