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
Doris Lessing
Born place: in Kermanshah, Iran
Born date October 22, 1919
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“Honestly, Edythe, Mama says, like she’s going to give her the most important advice in the world, If you continue acting this way, you will be unpopular for the rest of your life. I wish I could go someplace far away”
― Rebecca Wells, quote from Little Altars Everywhere
“They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away the remembrance and the knowledge.”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from Women in Love
“What of miniature boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves, launched onto cold water clear as air? How many fleets were pushed out toward the middles of ponds or sent down autumn brooks, holding treasures of acorns, or black feathers, or a puzzled mantis? Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from the ocean siege or October breeze.”
― Paul Harding, quote from Tinkers
“You always have a choice. Don't ever imagine you don't. Whatever you do, it's a decision and you have to accept responsibility for it. That's when honor becomes more than empty words.”
― quote from Stalking Darkness
“Ways of loving from a distance, mating without even touching-Amor platonicus! The ladder of love one is expected to climb higher and higher, elating the Self and the Other. Plato clearly regards any actual physical contact as corrupt and ignoble because he thinks the true goal of Eros is beauty. Is there no beauty in sex? Not according to Plato. He is after `more sublime pursuits.' But if you ask me, I think Plato's problem, like those of many others, was that he never got splendidly laid.”
― Elif Shafak, quote from The Bastard of Istanbul
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