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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
Believer
Cross
Obeisance
Crosses
Mumbling
Church
Lapsed
Like
Abhorrence
Apartheid
Believers
Entering

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I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
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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.
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If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa
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I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn't speak publicly.
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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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Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
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You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
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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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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
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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 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.
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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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Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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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