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e9eaf00
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Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.
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Doris Lessing |
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ea453e8
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A hundred things to do, but only one thing to be," he said, obstinately. "But perhaps I don't feel myself worthy of such a wealth of opportunity?"
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Doris Lessing |
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996644e
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So much of my life has been twisted and painful that now when happiness floods right through me like being flooded over with warm glittering blue water, I can't believe it. I say to myself: I am Anna Wulf, this is me, Anna, and I'm happy.
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Doris Lessing |
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643333e
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Yes, my child, you must read. You must read everything that comes your way. It doesn't matter what you read at first, later you'll learn discrimination. Schools are no good, Matty, you learn nothing at school. If you want to be anything, you must educate yourself.
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Doris Lessing |
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d3795ba
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Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider's egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled,..
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nature
ethiopia
sunrise
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Doris Lessing |
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60eb1f4
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People don't mind immoral messages. They don't mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex's sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can't stand is to be told it all doesn't matter, they can't stand formlessness.
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Doris Lessing |
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39b52bf
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Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
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Doris Lessing |
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4fc020d
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We are being punished, that's all." "What for?" he demanded, already on guard because there was a tone in her voice he hated. "For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would be."
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Doris Lessing |
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fa71296
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This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are *equipped.* Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we -- we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything. ...You, running about playing at revolutions, playing little games, thinking you're important. You're just peasants, you'll never *do* anything.
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Doris Lessing |
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0493fca
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We had a kind of pity for each other; we were both afflicted permanently with a feeling of sad helplessness because we were unable to make each other happy in this way. But nothing stopped us from choosing other partners. We did not. That I did not, isn't surprising, because of that quality in me I call lethargy, or curiosity, which always keeps me in a situation long after I should leave it.
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Doris Lessing |
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50fc0c3
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you can only value something if you've experienced it.
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Doris Lessing |
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15fd1c2
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We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.
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truth
doris-lessing
indoctrination
culture
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Doris Lessing |
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36bb012
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But when you get down to it, it's all a lie. You sit here writing and writing, but no one can see it--that's arrogant, I told you so before. And you aren't even honest enough to let yourself be what you are--everything's divided off and split up. So what's the use of patronising me and saying: You're in a bad phase. If you're not in a bad phase, then it's because you can't be in a phase, you take care to divide yourself into compartments. I..
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Doris Lessing |
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dc23ed6
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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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women
politics
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Doris Lessing |
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483666e
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Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.
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Doris Lessing |
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e3058c1
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Her source of self respect was that she had not - as she put it - given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage.
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Doris Lessing |
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cf1b22c
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Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.
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Doris Lessing |
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a3433b7
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I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. (So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living ...)
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writing
novel
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Doris Lessing |
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6708c59
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The nightmare takes various forms, comes in sleep, or in wakefulness, and can be pictured most simply like this: There is a blindfolded man standing with his back to the brick wall. He has been tortured nearly to death. Opposite him are six men with their rifles raised ready to shoot, commanded by a seventh, who has his hand raised, When he drops his hand, the shots will ring out, and the prisoner will fall dead. But suddenly there is somet..
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Doris Lessing |
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fc99a95
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There are people in the world all the time who know" the professor said. "But they keep quiet. They just move about quietly, saving the people who know they are in the trap. And then, for the ones who have got out, it's like coming around from chloroform. They realize that all their lives they've been asleep and dreaming. And then it's their turn to learn the rules and the timing. And they become the ones to live quietly in the world, just ..
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Doris Lessing |
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7f8ce71
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
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love
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Doris Lessing |
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b2da1b8
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In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest, and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I am on my side, she crouches looking into my face. Soft, soft touches of her paw. I open my eyes, say I don't want to wake. I close my eyes. Cat gently pats my eyelids. Cat licks my nose. Cat starts purring, two inches from my face. Cat, then, as I lie pretending to be asleep, delicately bites my nose. I laugh and sit up. At which sh..
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Doris Lessing |
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33b62a6
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Yes. Laugh. But there's sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.' He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. 'What position?' - I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments.
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Doris Lessing |
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b69d4a1
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So very Russian," people around were murmuring. That they did meant this was an audience pretty low down on the scale of sophistication, otherwise they would be saying, "Just like us, isn't it?"
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Doris Lessing |
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1b95e2e
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Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels wil..
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writing
journalist
curiosity
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Doris Lessing |
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33b11d8
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Her ears, lightly fringed with white that looked silver, lifted and moved, back, forward, listening and sensing. Her face turned, slightly, after each new sensation, alert. Her tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her other organs could not. She sat poised, air-light, looking, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, with all of her, fur, whiskers, ears -- everything, in delicate vibration.
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Doris Lessing |
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99a3b01
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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.
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Doris Lessing |
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876077e
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And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of 'personality'. Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the 'personality' doesn't exist any more. It's the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We're told so often that human personality has disintegrated..
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Doris Lessing |
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9b913c8
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While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot held an infant or a small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a body... then something like a stick insect, enormous bulging eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbs... a small girl all blurred, her fl..
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Doris Lessing |
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3daaabb
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Most people cannot stand being alone for long. They are always seeking groups to belong to, and if one group dissolves, they look for another. We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong with that. But what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us. When we're in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to ..
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Doris Lessing |
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9557cb3
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I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed. Great things have been achieved through feminism. We now have pretty much equality at least on the pay and opportunities front, though almost nothing has been done on child care, the real liberation. We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Wh..
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Doris Lessing |
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519de6a
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She had known it all the time: I'm so enormously exhausted, so utterly, basically tired, and in fibre of myself, that to know I haven't got to go through with living is like a reprieve. How extraordinary! And every one of these people, with the possible exception of this exuberant young man, is terrified that the machine is going to crash, and yet we all trooped obediently into it. So perhaps we all feel the same way?
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Doris Lessing |
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86bf0a1
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The human being is given by Nature little more energy than what is needed to maintain the species; to reproduce and to live out our (very short) spans. But if we want to be fit for the journey up and out of the limits of ordinary life, we have to learn not to waste energy. Which we do by busying ourselves too much with material things, and by using our minds in wasteful and damaging ways. You will have seen that I am describing concepts fam..
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Doris Lessing |
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e3617c5
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she had to fight for qualities that had not been even in her vocabulary. Patience. Self-discipline. Self-control. Self-abnegation. Chastity. Adaptability to others - this above all. This always.
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Doris Lessing |
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b764b40
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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 thei..
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Doris Lessing |
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3d4820d
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But my poor Saul, there's no help for you, you're heading straight for it. What about all those marvelous people we know, aged about fifty or sixty? Well, there are a few of them...marvelous, mature, wise people. Real people, the phrase is, radiating serenity. And how did they get to be that way? Well, we know, don't we? Every blood one of them's got a history of emotional crime, oh the sad bleeding corpses that litter the road to maturity ..
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Doris Lessing |
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c28eddb
|
Oh, no, I'm not saying she isn't a nut -- she is -- but I've noticed before that sometimes someone like that behaves quite ordinarily with everybody, manages everything, you'd never think she was a nut, but there's just one person, with that person, she's out of control. It makes you wonder,' said Alice.
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Doris Lessing |
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3ed11c1
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It was not a question of Philip's having "lost hold." He had never grasped hold. Something had not happened that should have happened: a teacher, or someone, should have said: This one, Philip Fowler, he must be a craftsman, do something small, and delicate and intricate; we must get him trained for that. Look how perfectly he does things! He can't fold a shirt or arrange some chips and a piece of fish on a plate without making a picture of..
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Doris Lessing |
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f6c7e48
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As for Anna she was thinking: If I join in now, in a what's-wrong-with-men session, then I won't go home, I'll stay for lunch and all afternoon, and Molly and I will feel warm and friendly, all barriers gone. And when we part, there'll be a sudden resentment, a rancour--because after all, our real loyalties are always to men, and not to women...Anna nearly sat down, ready to submerge herself. But she did not. She thought: I want to be done ..
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Doris Lessing |
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7a79a0b
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My sense of urgency is very simple,' said the professor, 'I've remembered that much. It's because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that's what anxiety is, in a lot of people. They know they have to do something, they should be doing something else, not just living hand-to-mouth, putting paint on their faces and decorating their caves and playing nasty tricks on their rivals. No. They have to do something else bef..
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Doris Lessing |
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5600ae2
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The stinting poverty in which they lived was unbearable; it was destroying them. It did not mean that there was not enough to eat: it meant that every penny must be watched, new clothes foregone, amusements abandoned, holidays kept in the never-never-land of the future. A poverty that allows a tiny margin for spending, but which is shadowed always by a weight of debt that nags like a conscience, is worse than starvation itself. That was how..
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Doris Lessing |
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4b45f5a
|
Mas como era extraordinaria aquela sala cheia de gente -- ou melhor, de animais -, a olhar na mesma direccao, para outros animais mascarados e treinados para representar num palco, para animais cobertos de tecido e bocados de peles, ornamentados com pedras e de rostos e garras pintados. Toda a gente acabara de comer um animal de qualquer especie; as peles que se viam por toda a parte, apesar de a noite estar quente, provinham de animas que ..
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life
conscience
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Doris Lessing |
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dd83c90
|
For many thousands of years people had looked at expensive heads of hair and thought of how much food and warmth they represented, so obviously it was a thought of no use at all, so why bother to have it? But thoughts of this sort did go ticking on, useless or not.
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Doris Lessing |
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36481b7
|
If someone cracks up, what does that mean? At what point does a person about to fall to pieces say: I'm cracking up? And if I were to crack up, what form would it take?
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Doris Lessing |