Nadine Gordimer Quotes

one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity. They continue to love, to laugh, to get pleasure out of life.

Bring death and life together.

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.

You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.

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.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer—regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando—shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa.

I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses — the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.

...in whom self-control has been strongly established since childhood”, and that the evening of the murder was no exception.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

As a writer, I'm a composite intelligence.

The height of the grass. Look at the reeds. Everything bends, blends, folds. Everything is continually swaying, flowing rippling waving surging streaming fingering.

The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.

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.

The day the cease-fire was signed she was caught in a crowd. Peasant boys from Europe who had made up the colonial army and freedom fighters whose column had marched into town were staggering about together outside the barracks, not three blocks from her house in whose rooms, for ten years, she had heard the blurred parade-ground bellow of colonial troops being trained to kill and be killed.