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.
Nadine GordimerRead
People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
Interpretation
True gifts are intangible and come from the heart rather than material possessions.
Nadine Gordimer's quote conveys the idea that the most valuable gifts we can give and receive are not physical items, but rather emotions, love, support, and understanding. These intangible gifts enrich our relationships and foster deeper connections, highlighting the importance of emotional generosity over materialism.
In practice
In a wedding speech, one might say, 'Remember, we give each other love that can't be gift wrapped.'
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.
The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.
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.
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love.
In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.
I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.
Marrying the first person who offers you a decent position in society. Love can wait.
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them,and drives us further apart.
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