Nadine Gordimer: Wise Words About Bettering A Troubled World

The great novelist Nadine Gordimer, whose stories told of the immorality of apartheid in her beloved South Africa, has died at age 90.

Gordimer was not only a writer. She was an activist in the fight to end apartheid. In her writings and speeches, the Nobel Prize winner offered words of enlightenment for anyone sharing her commitment to bring a better life to those suffering from prejudice, poor health, poverty, and other ills.

Here is a sampling of her inspirational, unsentimental advice:

"People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped."

"A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings."

"Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter."

"The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful."

"There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice."

"Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is."

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