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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
Former
Slave
Masks
Masters
Underneath
Easier
Recognise
Trust
Slaves
Humanity
Aside
Faces
Mask
Wearing
More quotes by Nadine Gordimer
All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
Nadine Gordimer
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.
Nadine Gordimer
in writing, sex doesn't matter it's the writing that matters.
Nadine Gordimer
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
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.
Nadine Gordimer
I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
Nadine Gordimer
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
Nadine Gordimer
Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
Nadine Gordimer
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
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 gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.
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
As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
Nadine Gordimer
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
Nadine Gordimer
Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
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
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.
Nadine Gordimer
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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
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