Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Nadine Gordimer (South African Novelist)

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) was a South African novelist and short-story writer who received the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her experience of the effects of apartheid, racial inequality, and the disintegration of South African society informed much of her work.

Born into a Jewish family in Springs, Transvaal, now in Gauteng, Gordimer was mostly self-educated. She briefly attended the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

The stark contrast between Gordimer’s wealthy background and the conditions experienced by black miners in her home town of Johannesburg inspired her writing. Her first books were short stories: Face to Face (1949) and The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952.)

Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days (1953,) featured a white girl who prevails over her parents’ provincial narrow-mindedness and racial bigotry and must overcome the limitations of her social background. The themes of isolation and alienation dominated her novels Occasion for Loving (1963,) The Late Bourgeois World (1966,) The Conservationist (1974; Booker Prize,) A Guest of Honour (1970,) Burger’s Daughter (1979,) July’s People (1981,) and A Sport of Nature (1987.)

Gordimer’s notable later works include the novels None to Accompany Me (1994,) The House Gun (1998,) The Pickup (2001,) and Get a Life (2005,) and the volume of essays Writing and Being (1995.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Nadine Gordimer

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.
Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Progress

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
Topics: Censorship

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Sacrifice

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
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts

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.
Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Attachment

In a democracy—even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-elitist 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
Topics: Law

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
Topics: Heaven

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

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

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
Topics: Travel, Tourism

Truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Truth

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