And for a moment I accept the triumph as I had managed it.” - Nadine Gordimer

When you live in a small town far from the world you read about in municipal library books, the advent of repair men in the house is a festival. Daily life is gaily broken open, improvisation takes over.

Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society…A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implication and he is politically committed. (1983)

The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical.”