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Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
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
Best
Efforts
Would
Definitions
Unwritten
Men
Powers
Charter
Perhaps
Convenience
Progress
Gaps
Effort
Narrow
Power
Continuing
Women
Definition
More quotes by Nadine Gordimer
Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
Nadine Gordimer
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
Nadine Gordimer
Communists are the last optimists.
Nadine Gordimer
A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
Nadine Gordimer
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.
Nadine Gordimer
Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? 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.
Nadine Gordimer
Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
Nadine Gordimer
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.
Nadine Gordimer
I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn't speak publicly.
Nadine Gordimer
The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can't believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
Nadine Gordimer
The facts are always less than what really happened.
Nadine Gordimer
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
Nadine Gordimer
I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
Nadine Gordimer
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.
Nadine Gordimer
In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
Nadine Gordimer
It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
Nadine Gordimer
And this indifference is still very much present in modern South Africa. Just listen to Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer - a representative of the British elite in this country: Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.
Nadine Gordimer
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
Nadine Gordimer
Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.
Nadine Gordimer
It was a miracle it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
Nadine Gordimer
