Nadine Gordimer Quotes

The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks.

The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence...

You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.

It is not a life at all. It is a reticence, in three volumes.

Not a living thing was to be seen and the cottages that sat huddled close to the ground remained fast shut; the smoke from the chimneys alone still gave a sign of life.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.

The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.

The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!

I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams.

The desert takes our dreams away from us, and they don't always return.

Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word," he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

Desert, in generally, is a very good place to find yourself. Or lose yourself.

Earth, left silent by the wind of night,Seems shrunken 'neath the gray unmeasured height.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Once again there was the desert, and that only.

The Great Arizona Desert is full of the bleaching bones of people who waited for me to start something.

A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.