176 Quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.

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

The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.

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

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.

The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight – all their lives.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

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.