Nadine Gordimer quotes - page 3

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice. (Nadine Gordimer)
Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
I cannot live with someone who can't live without me. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation, death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun and moon, plenty and disaster. With myth, the writer's ancestors, the oral story-tellers, began to feel out and formulate these mysteries, using the elements of daily life - observable reality - and the faculty of the imagination - the power of projection into the hidden - to make stories. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books... But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Books dont need batteries. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn't speak publicly. (Nadine Gordimer)
I don't think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
The process of standing apart and being involved has come. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
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. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
There are many proven explanations for natural phenomena now; and there are new questions of being arising out of some of the answers. For this reason, the genre of myth has never been entirely abandoned, although we are inclined to think of it as archaic. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
A truly living human being cannot remain neutral. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged. (Nadine Gordimer)
Newspapers are horror happening to other people. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship. View quote
Nadine Gordimer