Nadine Gordimer

The height of the grass. Look at the reeds. Everything bends, blends, folds. Everything is continually swaying, flowing rippling waving surging streaming fingering.

In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together.

I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.

That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, <i>ecosystem</i>? Where to decide it begins.

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others

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

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.

Pero las cuestiones humanas no conducían a conclusiones tajantes, al trazado de una línea ni a una suma total. Parecían resolverse, disolverse, cuando sólo se estaban formando de nuevo, reuniéndose en otra combinación. Incluso cuando estamos muertos, lo que hicimos continúa tramando estas nuevas combinaciones.

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

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

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

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

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?

There were other gadgets, noticed about the settlement, she privately recognized as belonging to her: a small garden knife-grinder that had been in the mine house kitchen before her own, a pair of scissors in the form of a stork with blades for beak that she actually saw in July's hand when he reproached the old woman for trimming his baby's toenails with a razor blade. These things were once hers, back there; he must have filched them long ago. What else, over the years? Yet he was perfectly honest. When he was cleaning the floor, and found a cent rolled there, he would put it on Bam's bedside table. They had never locked anything, not even their liquor cupboard. If she had not happened - by what chance in a million, by what slow certain grind between the past and its retribution - to be here now, she would never have missed these things:so honesty is how much you know about anybody, that's all.

The creative act is not pure.