Nadine Gordimer Quotes

Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

I certainly wouldn't say that my life is a disaster, but there have been moments where I've felt like that.

You know, I think anybody who has been in relationships has access to heartbreak - I don't think we have to go far to find it, whether we inflicted the heartbreak or whether we were the recipient of it.

Love is hard.

War is the easiest photography in the business. Just get close, be lucky, know how your camera works. There are subjects everywhere. Everyplace you go, there is something to photograph in a war, like being in the middle of a hurricane or a train crash or an earthquake. You can't miss it.

I have a husband and children, and it affects me deeply that somebody could be taken away in a second.

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

Love is so holy, so confusing. It makes a man anxious, tormented. Love, how can I define it?

I feel like love is the thing we were created for, yet it's the place we struggle the most.

For you to ask advice on the rules of love is no better than to ask advice on the rules of madness.

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

Everybody has a story... and a scream.

Being in a relationship is a hard, painful slog at least once a week, maybe more often - especially if you have a lot of defenses to let down, or if your parents didn't know how to love you very well.

I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry.

Love is full of anxious fears.

Loneliness sucks. It's a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game.

They say that love is blind, but it's trauma that's blind. Love sees what is.

In 2006, I started making a film called 'Restraint of Beasts.' While I was making it, I had a personal disaster. My wife fell ill, so we stopped shooting halfway through. And then sadly, my wife died.

There's the idea that love is supposed to hurt, but it really shouldn't hurt.

I don't like to watch train wrecks.

Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.