Quotes from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“We are all creatures of the stars.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“War...strengthened the position of the armament industries...to a point...that these industries dominated the economies and therefore the governments of all the participating nations...war barbarised and lowered the already very low level of accepted conduct.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate. But when the Gods explode, or err, or dissolve into flying clouds of gas, or shrink, or expand, or whatever else their fates might demand, then the minuscule items of their substance may in their small ways express—not protest, which of course is inappropriate to their station in life—but an acknowledgement of the existence of irony: yes, they may sometimes allow themselves—always with respect—the mildest possible grimace of irony.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“Standardisation of intellectual and emotional patterns had become extreme. A main mechanism for achieving this was a device that supplied identical indoctrinational material simultaneously into every living or working unit, whether that of a single person, a family, or an institution, through a whole country. These programmes were standardised, particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic—kindness to animals, for instance—but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“The young often have moments of clear thinking, which as they grow older become fewer, and muddied. He had kept alive in some part of him a knowledge that he was “destined” to do something or other. He felt this as pure and unsullied, but—more often and more deeply as he grew older—“impractical”.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laughs, and he calls his wife and says: Look, we are seeing something that ceased to exist millions of years ago—and she sees, exactly, and laughs with him.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - "nostalgia" is their word for it - which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“What you don’t understand is, people never believe these things. Not until they experience them. Then when they experience them they become people other people don’t believe. Hard lines.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born - and yet in each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from his low half-animal state to true humanity. Each one of them with this potential, and yet so few can be reached, to make the leap.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“...a family wanting no more than to live without challenge or drama could easily find a quiet street, and "peace," provided they were fortunate enough to live in a comparatively sheltered and favoured geographical area, and provided they were able to make the mental adjustment to relegate war - and its consequences - into something that happened elsewhere and did not affect them; or something that had happened to them, but between such and such dates, and then taken itself off.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“I suddenly saw her quite differently. I saw that she was a person. Not my mother. She had thought it all out. She had wanted to commit suicide. She would never commit suicide. On that night I grew up. Or so I would like to believe.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

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Popular quotes

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“Our life together was filled with contrasts. One week we were croc hunting with Dateline in Cape York. Only a short time after that, Steve and I found ourselves out of our element entirely, at the CableACE Award banquet in Los Angeles.
Steve was up for an award as host of the documentary Ten Deadliest Snakes in the World. He lost out to the legendary Walter Cronkite. Any time you lose to Walter Cronkite, you can’t complain too much. After the awards ceremony, we got roped into an after-party that was not our cup of tea.
Everyone wore tuxedos. Steve wore khaki. Everyone drank, smoked, and made small talk, none of which Steve did at all. We got separated, and I saw him across the room looking quite claustrophobic. I sidled over.
“Why don’t we just go back up to our room?” I whispered into his ear. This proved to be a terrific idea. It fit in nicely with our plans for starting a family, and it was quite possibly the best seven minutes of my life!
After our stay in Los Angeles, Steve flew directly back to the zoo, while I went home by way of one my favorite places in the world, Fiji. We were very interested in working there with crested iguanas, a species under threat. I did some filming for the local TV station and checked out a population of the brilliantly patterned lizards on the Fijian island of Yadua Taba.
When I got back to Queensland, I discovered that I was, in fact, expecting. Steve and I were over the moon. I couldn’t believe how thrilled he was. Then, mid-celebration, he suddenly pulled up short. He eyed me sideways.
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“Remember the CableACE Awards? Where you got bored in that room full of tuxedos?”
He gave me a sly grin. “Ah, yes,” he said, satisfied with his paternity (as if there was ever any doubt!). We had ourselves an L.A. baby.”
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“I'm not a person who thinks they can have it all, but I certainly feel that with a bit of effort and guile I should be able to have more than my fair share.”
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“Did you love Paul Ivory?"
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