Daily Inspiration Quote by Nadine Gordimer

Power, Gordimer suggests, is a contaminant: the moment you can affect someone else's life, you inherit guilt. The line lands with the crisp severity of someone who watched authority operate not as an abstraction but as a daily system - apartheid South Africa, where the mundane could be weaponized and where "normal" civic life depended on coerced invisibility. By placing "innocence" on "this side of the womb", she frames adulthood not as moral awakening but as moral compromise. Birth is the border crossing; after it, you're implicated.

The sentence works because it refuses the comforting myth of clean hands. Gordimer doesn't let power mean only presidents, police, and prison gates. Power is also the landlord, the editor, the neighbor, the lover - the person who can withhold, reward, define, or name. Her phrasing turns innocence into a kind of prenatal fantasy, a state that can only exist before choice, before speech, before complicity. In a society structured around unequal permission - who may move freely, who may own, who may speak without fear - even opting out becomes a position with consequences.

There's also a novelist's shrewdness here: she collapses morality into embodiment. "The womb" is visceral, intimate, unarguable. It undercuts the liberal pose of neutrality by insisting that neutrality is just power wearing a polite mask. Gordimer's intent isn't nihilism; it's accountability. If innocence is impossible, then ethics isn't purity - it's what you do with your inevitable leverage.