Nadine Gordimer > Quotes

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.”
― Nadine Gordimer, The House Gun

“Books don't need batteries.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“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

“The facts are always less than what really happened.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“My answer is: Recognize yourself in others”
― Nadine Gordimer

“Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self”
― Nadine Gordimer

“The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.”
― Nadine Gordimer, Conversations with Nadine Gordimer

“Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.”
― Nadine Gordimer, The Quotable Gordimer; or, The Wit and Wisdom of Nadine Gordimer

“The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.”
― Nadine Gordimer, Get a Life

“Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.”
― Nadine Gordimer, Get a Life

“I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.”
― Nadine Gordimer, The Quotable Gordimer; or, The Wit and Wisdom of Nadine Gordimer

“Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.”
― Nadine Gordimer, My Son's Story

“At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“I don't want to know more about her; don't want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it's not her fault. --One is married and there is nothing to be done.-- Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It's other things he's said that are the text I'm living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There's nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other....

'This is the creature that has never been'--he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis inventé. ”
― Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter

“I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.”
― Nadine Gordimer, The Quotable Gordimer; or, The Wit and Wisdom of Nadine Gordimer

“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, Loot and Other Stories

“...with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another.”
― Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup

“I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.”
― Nadine Gordimer, The Quotable Gordimer; or, The Wit and Wisdom of Nadine Gordimer

“Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity”
― Nadine Gordimer

“The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“you like to have some cup of tea?-July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind.”
― Nadine Gordimer, July's People

“In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together.”
― Nadine Gordimer, None to Accompany Me

“They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space--atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“If you ask, 'What happens when we die? Why do we die?' you are asking, 'Why do we live?”
― Nadine Gordimer, The Quotable Gordimer; or, The Wit and Wisdom of Nadine Gordimer