Nadine Gordimer Quotes

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

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky.

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.

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.

...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.

I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.

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.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity

I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.

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

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.

If you ask, 'What happens when we die? Why do we die?' you are asking, 'Why do we live?

If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.

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.