Nadine Gordimer - People Quotes

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

Nadine Gordimer
People in delirium rise and sink, rise and sink, in and out of lucidity. The swaying, shuddering, thudding, flinging stops, and the furniture of life falls into place.

Nadine Gordimer
That was one of the things she held against missionaries: how they stressed Christ's submission to humiliation, and so had conditioned the people of Africa to humiliation by the white man.

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
The writer's imagination is the looter among other people's lives.

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
Television and newspapers show people's lives at a certain point. But novels tell you what happened after the riot, what happened when everybody went home.

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
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