Quote

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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Nadine Gordimer
Age: 90 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 20
Died: 2014
Died: July 13
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Scientific Editor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Turns
Vital
Individual
Individuals
Nature
Survival
Cannot
Various
Certain
Objects
Wager
Different
Circumstances
Wagers
Going
Events
Reveal
Turn
Advance

More quotes by 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.
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It was a miracle it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
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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.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
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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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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.
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There's no tiling moral about beauty.
Nadine Gordimer
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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.
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Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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 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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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
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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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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
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
Nadine Gordimer
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
Nadine Gordimer
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The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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