Doris Lessing · 365 pages
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“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
“Sometimes you have to control your own life and to do that you have to put your own needs first.”
― Jen Calonita, quote from Paparazzi Princess
“But nothing lasts forever. This city is changing for the worse. Sure it's getting bigger and it looks nicer, but the novelties are disappearing. The culture is fading. This isn't progress, kid. It's neighborhood genocide. You think about that.”
― quote from Exit Here.
“If we cannot understand the depth of feeling in the Muslim world toward Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islam as a political force, then we will be doomed to failure in every encounter we have with the world.”
― Hooman Majd, quote from The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
“Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn't see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That's what mothers told her: Oh, you don't know what you're missing; it's spiritual; I feel closer to the earth, to the creator of all things. Perhaps all of that was true--it must be true--but Grace also knew that mothering was work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. She'd known too many women who'd vanished after childbirth; women whose hopes and fears had been pushed to the back of the family closet; women who'd magically been replaced by their children and their children's desires.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from The Toughest Indian in the World
“When there are no new ideas things can remain the same,”
― Louis L'Amour, quote from Jubal Sackett
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