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

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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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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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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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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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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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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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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can't believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy 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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