Living in Hope and History: Notes From Our Century

Living in Hope and History: Notes From Our Century (1991) by Nadine Gordimer as a "modest book of some of the nonfiction pieces I've written, a reflection of how I've looked at this century I've lived in." It is, in fact, an extraordinary collection of essays, articles, and addresses delivered over four decades, including her Nobel Prize Lecture of 1991.

Quotes

• Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
  • Page 199
• 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. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag.
  • Page 199
• Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
  • Page 196
• Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
  • Page 199
• Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
  • Page 199.

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