Nadine Gordimer

The ugly mansions of the rich who had fled stood empty on the bluff above the sea.

Duncan found her and took her to hospital. He brought her back to life. Literally. She owes her life to Duncan; or she blames him.

There were other gadgets, noticed about the settlement, she privately recognized as belonging to her: a small garden knife-grinder that had been in the mine house kitchen before her own, a pair of scissors in the form of a stork with blades for beak that she actually saw in July's hand when he reproached the old woman for trimming his baby's toenails with a razor blade. These things were once hers, back there; he must have filched them long ago. What else, over the years? Yet he was perfectly honest. When he was cleaning the floor, and found a cent rolled there, he would put it on Bam's bedside table. They had never locked anything, not even their liquor cupboard. If she had not happened - by what chance in a million, by what slow certain grind between the past and its retribution - to be here now, she would never have missed these things:so honesty is how much you know about anybody, that's all.

Camus dealt with the question best. He said that he liked individuals who take sides more than literatures that do. 'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.' So Camus called for 'Courage in and talent in one's work.' And Márquez redefined tender fiction thus: The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can. I believe that these two statements might be the credo for all of us who write. They do not resolve the conflicts that have come, and will continue to come, to contemporary writers. But they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of the writer squarely to her and his existence, the reason to be, as a writer, and the reason to be, as a responsible human, acting, like any other, within a social context.

There was no mistaking her. She was a young woman whose cultivated gentleness of expression and shabby homespun style of dress, in the context in which she was encountered, suggested not transcendental meditation centre or environmental concern group or design studio, but a sign of identification with the humanity of those who had nothing and risked themselves.

Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer nights. A tourist could be fooled. Africa already; at last, even though he went to bed in yet another metropole.

The equidistant sea and sky were divided for her by the line of gravity like an hour-glass, through which a ship wrapped in pink-mauve haze passed from one element to the other, coming down over the horizon

a moment of high excitement shared through the roof of the cab

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.

I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it. (1979)

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.

That kind of act isn’t in the range of emotional control in which their son’s character was formed, or the contemporary ethic that men don’t own women. Therefore the act could not have been committed.

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.

I’ll go back. I’ll go back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and he’ll be there. They’ll be home, and I’ll remember them.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.