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Communists are the last optimists.

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
Communists
Optimist
Communist
Lasts
Last
Optimists

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
Nadine Gordimer
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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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
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
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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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
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
Nadine Gordimer
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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
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
Nadine Gordimer
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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
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
Nadine Gordimer
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Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
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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You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
Nadine Gordimer
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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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Writers themselves don't analyze what they do to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
Nadine Gordimer