Quote

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa

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
Would
Stay
White
Better
Firsts
First
Feel
African
Feels
Africa
Always
Second

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

Image
It was a miracle it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
in writing, sex doesn't matter it's the writing that matters.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
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
Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
Image
Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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
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
Image
Communists are the last optimists.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Books dont need batteries
Nadine Gordimer
Image
You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
Image
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
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