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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

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
Failed
Afraid
Many
Things
Never

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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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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All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
Nadine Gordimer
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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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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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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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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose we all struggle under censorship.
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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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
Nadine Gordimer
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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
Nadine Gordimer
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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
Nadine Gordimer
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I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
Nadine Gordimer
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
Nadine Gordimer
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
Nadine Gordimer
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer