99+ Nadine Gordimer Quotes On Happiness, Education And Death

Nadine Gordimer was a South African novelist, short story writer, and political activist. She was the recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature and is best known for her novels that explore the complex social and moral issues of apartheid in South Africa. Her works often focus on the personal stories of characters who are caught up in the political and social changes in her country. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Nadine Gordimer on life, happiness, education.

Top 10 Nadine Gordimer Quotes

1. A desert is a place without expectation.
2. A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
3. The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
4. 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.
5. Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
6. 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.
7. In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
8. Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
9. All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
10. The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

Nadine Gordimer Short Quotes

• Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
• There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
• The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
• Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
• Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
• Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter.
• Books dont need batteries
• You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results.
• Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
• Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self

Nadine Gordimer Quotes About Life

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

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it. — 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

Music has no limits of a life-span. — Nadine Gordimer

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it. — 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

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life. — Nadine Gordimer

Writing is making sense of life. — Nadine Gordimer

About the joys and the courage, I really don't know what other people think. I just know that I've never left Africa. I've lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity. — Nadine Gordimer

The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light. — Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer Quotes About Censorship

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. — Nadine Gordimer

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship. — Nadine Gordimer

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship. — Nadine Gordimer

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship. — Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer Famous Quotes And Sayings

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars. — Nadine Gordimer

In a democracy -- even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-?litist one -- the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law. — Nadine Gordimer

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

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it. — Nadine Gordimer

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful. — Nadine Gordimer

From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters. — Nadine Gordimer

a writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing - he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people. — Nadine Gordimer

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views. — Nadine Gordimer

The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can't believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it. — Nadine Gordimer

Once you have some sort of reputation in the outside world, they will try to woo you. They will say, "Won't you come and be on a talk program about books? That's not political." Then they can say to the outside world, "See how free it is, she appears on television. See how free it is." So I refused to have anything of mine read or dramatized on South African television. — Nadine Gordimer

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season. — Nadine Gordimer

Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks. — Nadine Gordimer

in writing, sex doesn't matter; it's the writing that matters. — Nadine Gordimer

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

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

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings. — Nadine Gordimer

One can't measure how a mood of confidence comes about. — Nadine Gordimer

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others — Nadine Gordimer

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa — Nadine Gordimer

I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings. — Nadine Gordimer

And this indifference is still very much present in modern South Africa. Just listen to Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer - a representative of the British elite in this country: Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation. — Nadine Gordimer

I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. — Nadine Gordimer

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

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

Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church. — Nadine Gordimer

As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence. — Nadine Gordimer

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

In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events. — Nadine Gordimer

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away. — Nadine Gordimer

Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer. — Nadine Gordimer

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

It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have. — Nadine Gordimer

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings. — Nadine Gordimer

Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time. — Nadine Gordimer

If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years. — Nadine Gordimer

I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that. — 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'm forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs. — Nadine Gordimer

what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life. — Nadine Gordimer

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself. — Nadine Gordimer

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors? — Nadine Gordimer

Communists are the last optimists. — Nadine Gordimer

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

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is. — Nadine Gordimer

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

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life. — Nadine Gordimer

There's no tiling moral about beauty. — Nadine Gordimer

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us. — 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. — Nadine Gordimer

Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature — Nadine Gordimer

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror. — 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. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag. — Nadine Gordimer

In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era. — Nadine Gordimer

I never talk about what I'm writing about currently, never. It's private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform. — 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 cannot live with someone who can't live without me. — Nadine Gordimer

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. — Nadine Gordimer

Newspapers are horror happening to other people. — Nadine Gordimer

it's impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be. — 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. — Nadine Gordimer

Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more - absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more. — Nadine Gordimer

Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. — Nadine Gordimer

I don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that... The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back. — Nadine Gordimer

Writing is always a voyage of discovery. — Nadine Gordimer

Life Lessons by Nadine Gordimer

1. Nadine Gordimer's work emphasizes the importance of standing up for what is right, even in the face of adversity. She teaches us to remain hopeful in the face of oppression, and to recognize the power of our individual actions.
2. Her novels also point to the need for us to be aware of our own privilege and to use it to help those who are less fortunate. By recognizing our own privilege, we can strive to create a more equal and just society.
3. Lastly, Gordimer encourages us to never give up on our dreams and to always strive to create a better world for ourselves and for those around us.