Nadine Gordimer Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

Nadine Gordimer
Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.

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

Nadine Gordimer
The present was his; he would arrange the past to suit it.

Nadine Gordimer
Literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too.

Nadine Gordimer
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

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

Nadine Gordimer
Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter.

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

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

Nadine Gordimer
I'm forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.

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

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

Nadine Gordimer
I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.

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

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

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

Nadine Gordimer
The two women gazed out of the slumped and sagging bodies that had accumulated around them.

Nadine Gordimer
She felt the natural ties of affinity rather than the conventional blind ties of the blood.

Nadine Gordimer
The caged eagle became a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment.

Nadine Gordimer
We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone.

Nadine Gordimer
If you're a writer, you can make the death of a canary stand for the whole mystery of death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nadine Gordimer