Authors Posters & Prints, “Gor...-Gou...-”
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms, home schoolers and scholars.

Nadine Gordimer
b. 11-20-1923; Johannesburg, South Africa

Nadine Gordimer a writer and political activist who dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa, was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature when she was recognized as a woman “who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity”.

Gordimer has recently been active in HIV/AIDS causes.

Nadine Gordimer quotes ~
• “Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter.”
• “Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
• “Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.”
• “The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.”
• “Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?”
• “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.”
• “I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.”

Edward Gorey
b. 2-22-1925; Chicago
d. 4-15-2000

Edward St. John Gorey was a writer and artist noted for his macabre illustrated books. Watch the opening animation of PBS Mystery!, for a taste of his work.

Edward Gorey quotes ~
• “To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.”
• “Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.”

• Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey

Maxim Gorky
née Alexei Maximovich Peshkov
b. 3-28-1868; Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire
d. 6-14-1936; near Moscow

Author Maxim Gorky was a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. Gorky was known to write incessantly and viewing “literature less as an aesthetic practice (though he worked hard on style and form) than as a moral and political act that could change the world”.

He was influenced by the Russian writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky.

Maxim Gorky quotes ~
• “When one loves somebody everything is clear - where to go, what to do - it all takes care of itself and one doesn't have to ask anybody about anything.”
• “Only mothers can think of the future-because they give birth to it in their children.”
• “Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man – Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?”
• “When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.”

• Autobiography of Maxim Gorky

Marie-Olympe de Gouges
b. 12-31-1748; France
d. 11-3-1793; Paris

Marie-Olympe de Gouges was a writer, feminist, & revolutionary who was guillotined during the French Reign of Terror.

Olympe de Gouges quotes ~
• “Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility.”
• “Women have the right to mount the scaffold; they should likewise have the right to mount the rostrum.”