Nadine Gordimer Quotes

Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?

ثمة شيء مخادع في الإذعان بالنسبة إلى شخص لم يحسب أنه أذعن يوما !

My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer.

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it’s as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away.

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

Communists are the last optimists.

I'm an atheist. I wouldn't even call myself an agnostic. I am an atheist.

That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins.

That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine.

Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.

... what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold.

So everything is something else.

The creative act is not pure.

You don’t have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there’s a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.

I opened the telegram and said, 'He's dead.