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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

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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
Masters
Underneath
Easier
Recognise
Trust
Slaves
Humanity
Aside
Faces
Mask
Wearing
Former
Slave
Masks

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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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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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In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
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The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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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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I don't think I am a citizen of the world I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
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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.
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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.
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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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Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
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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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Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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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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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.
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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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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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Books dont need batteries
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