Top 8 Margie Orford Quotes

Our culture works with ways of looking. If you think of the colonial gaze — the scopic power is masculine. You see it. You take it. It’s yours. We learn to reflect this gaze back on to ourselves as women when we look at ourselves in that objectifying way.

With language and art, we can restore something that has been erased. It’s a way of saying the unsayable, of restoring humanity.

The heart is blind. You can’t love unless you have the heart of a child. It’s beautiful, but it’s the thing that makes you vulnerable. And when this connects with the secrets you hold, it can create a distortion in the psyche.

I think we keep the secrets from ourselves. Because we have experienced a moment when you look into a person’s eyes and you see that how they are looking at you is dehumanising. In that moment, all your humanity is lost. And it’s unbearable. We keep that secret from our daughters, because we don’t want them to be seen in that way.

There was such a sense of liberation and opening that sort of space that had been closed off so completely under Apartheid – no light, no oxygen – it really opened and expanded and into that came so much publishing and writing.

In fiction you have the mind, the interiority of the person, and the action happening at the same time. But I agree with you, they’re such different forms.

It’s a thing that requires complexity, people’s sexualities are very complex. There can be great desire in submission. It’s the image making and then the reduction of a full human response to this two-dimensional thing.

If I don’t write down what I’ve witnessed, who will? We can easily say we can’t look at this stuff, we can’t record it because it’s too shocking, but then what happens is there’s this silence, there’s this lacuna around it and it disappears.