Nadine Gordimer: Trending quotes

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Nadine Gordimer: 114 quotes2 likes

“The forces of being remain. They are what the writer, as distinct from the contemporary popular mythmaker, still engage today, as myth in its ancient form attempted to do.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships.”

Nadine Gordimer

Yonder Mark (ed.), The Quotable Gordimer, 2014.

“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.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light — and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau — into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“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.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.”

Nadine Gordimer

As quoted at ContemporaryWriters.com http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth03D25I553012635618

“Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art: trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle.”

Nadine Gordimer book Burger's Daughter

Burger's Daughter (1979) First lines

“The writer in relation to the nature of perceivable reality and what is beyond — imperceivable reality — is the basis for all these studies, no matter what resulting concepts are labelled, and no matter in what categorized microfiles writers are stowed away for the annals of literary historiography. Reality is constructed out of many elements and entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and left unexpressed for breathing-space in the mind.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“When the six-year-old daughter of a friend of mine overheard her father telling someone that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize, she asked whether I had ever received it before. He replied that the Prize was something you could get only once. Whereupon the small girl thought a moment: 'Oh' she said, 'so it's like chicken-pox.”

Nadine Gordimer

Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)

“The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.”

Nadine Gordimer

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1985) ed. Sterling McMurrin

“Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.”

Nadine Gordimer

"The conscience of South Africa talks about her country's new racial order" (1998) by Dwight Garner

“As a writer, I'm a composite intelligence.”

Nadine Gordimer

Yonder Mark (ed.), The Quotable Gordimer, 2014.

“Communists are the last optimists.”

Nadine Gordimer

Conrad in Burger's Daughter (1979), p. 42

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

Nadine Gordimer

"'A feeling of realistic optimism': An interview with Nadine Gordimer" by Karen Lazar, Salmagundi 113 (Winter 1997)

“Perhaps it is the positive knowledge that humans now possess the means to destroy their whole planet, the fear that they have in this way themselves become the gods, dreadfully charged with their own continued existence, that has made comic-book and movie myth escapist.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.”

Nadine Gordimer

"Great Problems in the Street," in I Will Still Be Moved (1963) ed. by Marion Friedmann

“There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“Music has no limits of a life-span.”

Nadine Gordimer

Yonder Mark (ed.), The Quotable Gordimer, 2014.