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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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
Stills
Power
Still
Amazing
Best
Bring
Human
Worst
Written
Humans
Words
Nature
More quotes by Nadine Gordimer
If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa
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
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
Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
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
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
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'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
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
Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
Nadine Gordimer
Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose we all struggle under censorship.
Nadine Gordimer
Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
Nadine Gordimer
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
Nadine Gordimer
From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
Nadine Gordimer
Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
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
Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
Nadine Gordimer
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
Nadine Gordimer
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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
