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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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Nadine Gordimer
Age: 90 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 20
Died: 2014
Died: July 13
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Scientific Editor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Crosses
Mumbling
Church
Lapsed
Like
Abhorrence
Apartheid
Believers
Entering
Believer
Cross
Obeisance

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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.
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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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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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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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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.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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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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.
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Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
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Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
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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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