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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

Nadine Gordimer

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Nadine Gordimer
Age: 90 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 20
Died: 2014
Died: July 13
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Scientific Editor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Making
Sense
Whole
Writing
Work
Area
Made
Areas
Life
Perhaps
Small

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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Books dont need batteries
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All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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.
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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose we all struggle under censorship.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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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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.
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Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
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You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
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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.
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Writers themselves don't analyze what they do to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.
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From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
Nadine Gordimer
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
Nadine Gordimer
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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
Nadine Gordimer
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I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
Nadine Gordimer
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
Nadine Gordimer
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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
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
Nadine Gordimer
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I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
Nadine Gordimer