123 quotes
I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead —" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say.
The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
'Even the cat buries its dirt; I carry mine around with me.' She thought of saying it aloud many times in the weeks after she came home from the hospital.
No globalisation without a human face.
A Letter to Future Generations (1999)
When you live in a small town far from the world you read about in municipal library books, the advent of repair men in the house is a festival. Daily life is gaily broken open, improvisation takes over.
A Soldier's Embrace: Stories (1980)
Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer nights. A tourist could be fooled. Africa already; at last, even though he went to bed in yet another metropole.
A Lion on the Freeway (1950)
'Courage in and talent in one's work.'
Writing and Being (1991)
All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity. (p252)
The Pickup (2001)
Music has no limits of a life-span.
The Quotable Gordimer (2014)
Flora pretended to cuddle me against the cold, but I didn't need her kind of emotional excitation. She talked about 'the girls' in there, and my mother was one of them.
Burger's Daughter (1979)
He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer—regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando—shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa.
The Moment Before the Gun Went Off (1988)
Afrikaner farmer—a regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando”
The Moment Before the Gun Went Off (1988)
That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine. (p144)
The Pickup (2001)
time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate
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.
The Quotable Gordimer (2014)
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.
The conscience of South Africa talks about her country's new racial order (1998)
Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
Writing and Being (1991)
Whatever happens to him, whatever he has done … he can come to us. There’s nothing you cannot tell us. We’re always there for you. Always.
The House Gun (1998)
Whether or not harmful intention was premeditated, when the accused picked up the gun … was he in a state of automatism in which … there was total loss of control?
The House Gun (1998)
'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.'
Writing and Being (1991)
When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension,’ they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a [B]lack man won’t stand aside for a white man.”
Six Feet of the Country (1956)