Quotes from Nadine Gordimer

I'll go back. I'll go back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and he'll be there. They'll be home, and I'll remember them.

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.

Death's the discarder.

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

I'm happy to be a card-carrying member of the ANC.

How did I find out? I was deceiving him.

You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.

But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone's breath fills a balloon's shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.

Love doesn't cast out fear but makes it possible to weep, howl, at least.

Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself.

To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?

You don't have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there's a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.

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

The equidistant sea and sky were divided for her by the line of gravity like an hour-glass, through which a ship wrapped in pink-mauve haze passed from one element to the other, coming down over the horizon

It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women--a new job, a new town, a divorce--which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal, or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves.

Es imposible dominar todos los temores y las pérdidas con antelación. Siempre hay fuentes de desolación que no se toman en consideración porque nadie sabe cuáles serán.

It's not a class struggle for blacks, it's a race struggle. The main reason why we're still where we are is blacks haven't united as blacks because we're told all the time to do it is to be racist.

What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates.

The malediction is upon him even if the law does not exact it.

Bam got up and had the menacing aspect of maleness a man has before the superego has gained control of his body, come out of sleep.

Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn't make the world over if it were to be as easy as that.

A funny thing, the simple pretty ones disintegrate when they drink, the clever handsome ones become more beautiful, their sex comes to the surface.