The Pickup Quotes

“But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another.”
― Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup

“That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine.”
― Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup

“The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.”
― Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup

“To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?”
― Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup