Nadine Gordimer Quotes

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014)

Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. (Nadine Gordimer Quotes)

“A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.”
Nadine Gordimer

“At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky.”
Nadine Gordimer

“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.”
Nadine Gordimer

“Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self”
Nadine Gordimer

“Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself.”
Nadine Gordimer

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

“I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.”
Nadine Gordimer

“I don’t cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.”
Nadine Gordimer

“I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.”
Nadine Gordimer

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

“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.”
Nadine Gordimer

“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.”
Nadine Gordimer

“I’m an atheist. I wouldn’t even call myself an agnostic. I am an atheist.”
Nadine Gordimer

“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.”
Nadine Gordimer

“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.”
Nadine Gordimer

“Love doesn’t cast out fear but makes it possible to weep, howl, at least.”
Nadine Gordimer

“Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”
Nadine Gordimer

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

“Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.”
Nadine Gordimer

“Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.”
Nadine Gordimer

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

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

“The facts are always less than what really happened.”
Nadine Gordimer

“The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.”
Nadine Gordimer

“The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight – all their lives.”
Nadine Gordimer

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

“The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
Nadine Gordimer

“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.”
Nadine Gordimer

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.”
Nadine Gordimer

“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.”
Nadine Gordimer