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

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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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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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Books dont need batteries
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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.
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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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I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
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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.
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There's no tiling moral about beauty.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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.
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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
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