Nadine Gordimer Quotes

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.

Books don't need batteries.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.

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

Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.

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 cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.

...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.

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.

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

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.

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.

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?

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

A desert is a place without expectation.

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.

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.

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

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

They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space--atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time.

Communists are the last optimists.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

The creative act is not pure.

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

The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.

So everything is something else.

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.

Pero las cuestiones humanas no conducían a conclusiones tajantes, al trazado de una línea ni a una suma total. Parecían resolverse, disolverse, cuando sólo se estaban formando de nuevo, reuniéndose en otra combinación. Incluso cuando estamos muertos, lo que hicimos continúa tramando estas nuevas combinaciones.

Her work sought to challenge all of us critically to reflect on the things we find comfort in believing without question.

How did I find out? I was deceiving him.

Music has no limits of a life-span.

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

Death's the discarder.

I'm happy to be a card-carrying member of the ANC.

To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?

You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.

Love doesn't cast out fear but makes it possible to weep, howl, at least.

من أكثر الأمور غرابة، أن تجد نفسك كل ليلة أمام بحر من العتمة.

Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself.

Equality was not freedom, it had only been the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom.

In the preface to my first collection of essays, Prepared for the Worst, in 1988, I annexed a thought of Nadine Gordimer’s, to the effect that a serious person should try and write posthumously. By that I took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints — of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and perhaps especially intellectual opinion — did not operate. Impossible perhaps to live up to, this admonition and aspiration did possess some muscle, as well as some warning of how it can decay. Then, about a year ago, I was informed by a doctor that I might have as little as another year to live. In consequence, some of my recent articles were written with the full consciousness that they may be my very last. Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected. But it has given me a more vivid idea of what makes life worth living, and defending.

The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.

I’ll go back. I’ll go back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and he’ll be there. They’ll be home, and I’ll remember them.

But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone’s breath fills a balloon’s shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.

She did have one book—a thick paperback snatched up in passing, until that moment something bought years ago and never read, perhaps it was meant for this kind of situation: Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, in translation as The Betrothed. She did not want to begin it because what would happen when she had read it? There was no other. Then she overcame the taboo (if she did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here when it was finished).

I’m asking you, it happens to interest me, is to kill the only sin we recognize. It’s the ultimate, isn’t it. Is that what you mean. No I don’t. Lies, theft, false witness, betrayal – Go on. Adultery, blasphemy, you believe in sin. I don’t think I do. I just believe in damage; don’t damage. That’s what [Duncan] was taught, that’s what he knows – knew. So now – is to take life the only sin recognized by people like me? Unbelievers. Not like you. Of course it’s not. I’ve said: it’s the ultimate. Nothing more terrible. Before God. She pushes him. Before God and man.

The pirogues came with live turtles, and with fish, with cloudy beer and wine made from bananas, palm nuts, or sorghum, and with the smoked meat of hippopotamus and crocodile. The vendors did a good trade with our crew and the passengers down at the third-class boat; the laughter, the exclamations, and the argument of bargaining were with us all day, heard but not understood, like voices in the next room. At stopping places, the people who were nourished on these ingredients of a witches' brew poured ashore across the single plank flung down for them, very human in contour, the flesh of the children sweet, the men and women strong and sometimes handsome. We, thank God, were fed on veal and ham and Brussels sprouts, brought frozen from Europe.

There was one of those sunsets beginning — the kind we've been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We've never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It's everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it's from atomic tests; but it's said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution.

I don't think that, when future generations look at the apartheid struggle, they will see it as quite the momentous literary cauldron that recent history has suggested. In fact, as well as recording the struggle for human rights, the literary account, which Gordimer has kept so faithfully and truthfully, may be seen as something of a storm in a teacup. Of course it was true that South Africa preserved in much-condensed form all the nasty prejudices and cruelties of an earlier age, and so it was of particular interest to the liberal West. How, it wondered, could something so obscenely and obviously wrong persist? But this was also obvious to every educated white person in South Africa. Certainly, in my family there were never any misconceptions about the nakedly discriminatory nature of Nationalist rule from 1948 to 1994. Those of us who left had many motives, but one of them was a reluctance to spend our lives attacking the indefensible, particularly in Marxist terms. The point I am making, and have been making for a few years, is that white South African writing rode a wave, whether consciously or not. The big issues that it tackled were in fact long since resolved: The South African Afrikaner government was a blind appendix loosely attached to the western digestive system.

Muere la escritora del 'antiapartheid' La sudafricana Nadine Gordimer, premio Nobel de Literatura en 1991, activista social y autora de 'La hija de Burger' e 'Historia de mi hijo', fallece en Johanesburgo

A funny thing, the simple pretty ones disintegrate when they drink, the clever handsome ones become more beautiful, their sex comes to the surface.

Es imposible dominar todos los temores y las pérdidas con antelación. Siempre hay fuentes de desolación que no se toman en consideración porque nadie sabe cuáles serán.

They had nothing. In their houses, there was nothing. At first. You had to stay in the dark of the huts a long while to make out what was on the walls. In the wife's hut a wavy pattern of broad white and ochre bands. In others - she did not know whether or not she was welcome where they dipped in and out all day from dark to light like swallows - she caught a glimpse of a single painted circle, an eye or target, as she saw it. In one dwelling where she was invited to enter there was the tail of an animal and a rodent skull, dried gut, dangling from the thatch. Commonly there were very small mirrors snapping at the stray beams of light like hungry fish rising. They reflected nothing. An impression - sensation - of seeing something intricately banal, manufactured, replicated, made her turn as if someone had spoken to her from back there. It was in the hut where the yokes and traces for the plough-oxen were. She went inside again and discovered insignia, like war medals, nailed just to the left of the dark doorway. The enamel emblem's Red Cross was foxed and pitted with damp, bonded with dirt to the mud and dung plaster that was slowly incorporating it. The engraved lettering on the brass arm-plaque had filled with rust. The one was a medallion of the kind presented to black miners who pass a First Aid exam on how to treat injuries likely to occur underground, the other was a black miner's badge of rank, the highest open to him. Someone from the mines; someone had gone to the gold mines and come home with these trophies. Or they had been sent home; and where was the owner? No one lived in this hut. But someone had; had had possessions, his treasure displayed. Had gone away, or died - was forgotten or was commemorated by the evidence of these objects left, or placed, in the hut. Mine workers had been coming from out of these places for a long, long time, almost as long as the mines had existed. She read the brass arm-plaque: Boss Boy.

There were other gadgets, noticed about the settlement, she privately recognized as belonging to her: a small garden knife-grinder that had been in the mine house kitchen before her own, a pair of scissors in the form of a stork with blades for beak that she actually saw in July's hand when he reproached the old woman for trimming his baby's toenails with a razor blade. These things were once hers, back there; he must have filched them long ago. What else, over the years? Yet he was perfectly honest. When he was cleaning the floor, and found a cent rolled there, he would put it on Bam's bedside table. They had never locked anything, not even their liquor cupboard. If she had not happened - by what chance in a million, by what slow certain grind between the past and its retribution - to be here now, she would never have missed these things:so honesty is how much you know about anybody, that's all.

Bam got up and had the menacing aspect of maleness a man has before the superego has gained control of his body, come out of sleep.

It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women--a new job, a new town, a divorce--which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal, or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves.

Nel discorso di accettazione del Nobel che ho già ricordato, Nadine Gordimer evoca una frase di Gabriel García Márquez: “Il modo migliore in cui uno scrittore può servire la rivoluzione è scrivere il meglio che può”. Senza imbrogli, senza scorciatoie, dicendo la verità.

Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist. I scroll

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn’t make the world over if it were to be as easy as that.

It's not a class struggle for blacks, it's a race struggle. The main reason why we're still where we are is blacks haven't united as blacks because we're told all the time to do it is to be racist.

The young man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places. [...] The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring. Pouring, pouring. She sat there, sick. A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp. She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself. She sat there not wanting to move or speak, or to look at anything even; so that the mood should be associated with nothing, no object, word, or sight that might recur and so recall the feeling again….Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner. The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer.

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.

Tydens die gesprek sê Breytenbach volgens Brink ook die volgende: Here man, dit vra nie dapperheid nie, dis so natuurlik as asemhaal. Nou kom sit jy op TV en as die man sê jy’s die grootste skrywer in SA, dan val jy hom nie in die rede nie: jy sê nie hokaai, wat van Alan Paton, wat van Nadine Gordimer, wat van Zeke Mphahlele? nie [sic] ... Jy bou vir jou ’n beeld op & jy vergeet eendag gaan jy ingehaal word.64

She put her hand on him, just under the left pectoral muscle, half patted, half slapped, half caressed. — This is what I believe in - flesh-and-blood people, no gods up in the sky or anywhere on the ground. ‘Development’ - one great big wonderful all-purpose god of a machine, eh, Superjuggernaut that’s going to make it all all right, put everything right if we just get the finance for it. The money and the know-how machine. Isn’t that it, with you? The politics are of no concern. The ideology doesn’t matter a damn. The poor devils don’t know what’s good for them, anyway. That’s how you justify what you condone - that’s what lets you off the hook, isn’t it - the Great Impartial. Development. No dirty hands or compromised minds. Neither dirty racist nor kaffir-boetie. Neither dirty Commie nor Capitalist pig. It’s all going to be decided by computer - look, no hands! Change is something programmed, not aspired to. No struggle between human beings. That’d be too smelly and too close. Let them eat cake, by all means - if production allows for it, and dividends are not affected, in time. —

The equidistant sea and sky were divided for her by the line of gravity like an hour-glass, through which a ship wrapped in pink-mauve haze passed from one element to the other, coming down over the horizon

I will not defend myself; those who judge me by the conduct of my life — my writings and actions — will bear witness that I cannot ‘return’ to an ivory tower I have never inhabited.

What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates.

The malediction is upon him even if the law does not exact it.