Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations.
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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
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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.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
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Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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.
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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.