Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nadine Gordimer
Age: 90 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 20
Died: 2014
Died: July 13
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Scientific Editor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Sometimes
Wander
Long
Learned
Things
Impossible
Since
Forever
Home
May
Come

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

Image
I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
Image
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
Image
I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
Image
Communists are the last optimists.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
Image
From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
Image
Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
Image
Music has no limits of a life-span.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
Nadine Gordimer