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Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.

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
Bonsai
Bleach
Sentiment
Sentiments
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More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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Books dont need batteries
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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There's no tiling moral about beauty.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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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
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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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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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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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a writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing - he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
Nadine Gordimer
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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
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Communists are the last optimists.
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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In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
Nadine Gordimer
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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
Nadine Gordimer
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About the joys and the courage, I really don't know what other people think. I just know that I've never left Africa. I've lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.
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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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
Nadine Gordimer
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
Nadine Gordimer
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in writing, sex doesn't matter it's the writing that matters.
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