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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

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
Sacrifice
Authority
Moral
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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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.
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Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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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.
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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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Books dont need batteries
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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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From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa
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I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.
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There's no tiling moral about beauty.
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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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Communists are the last optimists.
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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.
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What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
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I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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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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.
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