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7b791fd
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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..
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Doris Lessing |
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2f99e84
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She thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don't know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too close to a fire.
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Doris Lessing |
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072542d
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But after all, to kind of like people, doc, puts you in a pretty privileged class for a start--so few citizens can afford to really kinda like people.
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Doris Lessing |
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5f84e7b
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For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.
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Doris Lessing |
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f6eb199
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A continuity isn't necessarily right, just because it's a continuity.' 'Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is,
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Doris Lessing |
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86dc51a
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The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane.
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Doris Lessing |
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0cc74cc
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I mean,' said Marion happily, 'it's a continent in chains, well, isn't it?' (Tribune, thought Anna; or possibly the Daily Worker.) 'And measures ought to be taken immediately to restore the Africans' faith in justice if it is not already too late.' (The New Statesman, thought Anna.) 'Well at least the situation ought to be thoroughly gone into in the interests of everybody.' (The Manchester Guardian, at a time of acute crisis.) 'But Anna, I..
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Doris Lessing |
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de44cb0
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Yes, it's because it's one thing to think poor things and another to allow that African politics could have any resemblance at all to English politics--even such a long time ago.
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Doris Lessing |
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f8ed50d
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Of course it may be argued that this is a fairly bleak view of life. It means, for instance, that we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become your enemies-will, as it were, throw stones through your window. It means that if you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community's ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an..
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Doris Lessing |
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effd2f0
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For suddenly it had changed into that gear when time is slower - as when, falling off a ladder, one has time to think: I shall land so, just there, and I must turn in the air slightly... All this in a space of time normally too short for any thought at all. But we are wrong in dividing the mind's machinery from time: they are the same. It is only in such sharp emphatic moments that we recognize this fact.
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Doris Lessing |
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5741a82
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students should be told that an effort is always required, when you start to read a serious author, to overcome mental laziness and reluctance, because you are about to enter the mind of someone who thinks differently from yourself. And that is the whole point and the only point: the literary treasure-house has many mansions.
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Doris Lessing |
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920555b
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A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a million-fold the age of the Earth. But these same diviners, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilizations; they can't even begin to concede that civilizations might have very old histories. The Earth is allowed to be millions of millions of years old, but the birth of civilization is still set somewhere between ..
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Doris Lessing |
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f89501c
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Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
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Doris Lessing |
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46a5793
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She wanted to be acknowledged, her predicament given its value.
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Doris Lessing |
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d7aeeb3
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All those years were now seeming like a betrayal of what she really was. While her body, her needs, her emotions-all of herself-had been turning like a sunflower after one man, all that time she had been holding in her hands something else, the something precious, offering it in vain to her husband, to her children, to everyone she knew-but it had never been taken, had not been noticed. But this thing she had offered, without knowing she wa..
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Doris Lessing |
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5224b7f
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we were all experts at making a great deal out of very little, even while we all still had a lot, and were still being incited by advertisements to spend and use and discard
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Doris Lessing |
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b10f632
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She brought herself to decide she would make an effort to renew that friendship with the Cohens, for there was no one else who could help her. She wanted them to tell her what she must read. For there are two ways of reading: one of them deepens and intensifies what one already knows; from the other, one takes new facts, new views to weave into one's life. She was saturated with the first, and needed the second. All those books she had borr..
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Doris Lessing |
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576a5f8
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I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad." "Yes," said Kate. "I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?"
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self-determination
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Doris Lessing |
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c560edb
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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."
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nostalgia
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Doris Lessing |
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ac584d0
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The point is, it seems to me that my mind is a mass of totally contradictory attitudes about everything.' 'Everyone's mind is a mass of contradictory attitudes. Why should it matter?' 'It should matter to us, surely?
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Doris Lessing |
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dc70ce8
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You talk as if--a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can't be anything else. You can't change that.' 'Well then, I think that's the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.' 'Then I don't follow you. And I don't want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.
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Doris Lessing |
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d89b16b
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He leaves and she thinks for the hundredth time that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.
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Doris Lessing |
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ab59fd9
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But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles.
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Doris Lessing |
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8073354
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Zena bez muskarca ne moze se upoznati s muskarcem, s bilo kojim muskarcem , bilo koje dobi, a da ne pomisli, makar to bilo i na pola sekunde: Mozda je ovo pravi muskarac.
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Doris Lessing |
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6f88bba
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Victim-eyes of impersonal tragedy, to be impersonal no longer.
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Doris Lessing |
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5818456
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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"."
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Doris Lessing |
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90ec2d2
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I wrote] '...letters designed to hide behind.
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Doris Lessing |
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d533846
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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.
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Doris Lessing |
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a77d539
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themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.
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Doris Lessing |
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d4fb1a1
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As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical -- a man wouldn't use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to, was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her. She felt that without knowing it or being conscious of it (thoug..
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Doris Lessing |
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746dc31
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They have not yet evolved into an understanding of their individual selves as merely parts of a whole, first of all humanity, their own species, let alone achieving a conscious knowledge of humanity as part of Nature; plants, animals, birds, insects reptiles, and all these together making a small chord in the Cosmic Harmony
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Doris Lessing |
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8de489f
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Es terrible destruir la imagen que una persona tiene de si misma en aras de la verdad o cualquier otra abstraccion. ?Como saber si sera capaz de crear otra que le permita seguir viviendo?
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Doris Lessing |
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9e374b1
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The tale must be rehearsed-and we may amuse ourselves imagining how these must have been, often, acrimonious, or at least in dispute. Whose version of events is going to be committed to memory by the Memories?
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Doris Lessing |
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7f75306
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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.
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Doris Lessing |
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194034a
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Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And
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Doris Lessing |
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40f6227
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When she was older, after ten or so, she could tell she was being useful, but as a small child she was tolerated (only just, she knew) by this whirlwind of efficiency that was her mother organizing a party. Still she insisted on arranging fruit on a dish, or disposing ashtrays around the house, while her mother reduced her pace to Alice's. At least while "helping," Alice did not feel quite so much as if she were a tiny creature on top of a ..
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Doris Lessing |
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c551c2f
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Maryrose smiled good-humouredly, and remained in the circle of his arm, but as if she detached herself from him and every other man. Very many as it were professionally pretty girls have this gift of allowing themselves to be touched, kissed, held, as if this were a fee they have to pay to Providence for being born beautiful. There is a tolerant smile which goes with a submission to the hands of men, like a yawn or a patient sigh. But there..
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Doris Lessing |
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251ad12
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Oh, yes, Alice did know that she forgot things, but not how badly, or how often. When her mind started to dazzle and to puzzle, frantically trying to lay hold of something stable, then she always at once allowed herself -- as she did now -- to slide back into her childhood, where she dwelt pleasurably on some scene or other that she had smoothed and polished and painted over and over again with fresh colour until it was like walking into a ..
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Doris Lessing |
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643f46a
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Kompleks't za vina e pochti opredelenie na maichinstvoto v nashata prosvetena epokha.
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феминизъм
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Doris Lessing |
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5d8436d
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The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
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mankind
stupidity
humanity
truth
great-men
mountain
instinct
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Doris Lessing |
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436a616
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The thought [behind the Golden Notebook] was that to divide off and compartmentalize living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble. Old, young, black, white, men, women, capitalism, socialism: these great dichotomies undo us, force us into unreal categorization, make us look for what separates us rather than what we have in common.
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Doris Lessing |
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e8df282
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I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company... The novel is 'about' a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn't true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can't read that novel now without feeling ashame..
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Doris Lessing |
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3be8957
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Harriet's parents had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy one.
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Doris Lessing |
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3714d05
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Do you really think it's right for a socialist to get what he wants by making a fool of an old woman?' 'I'm earning her a lot of money.' 'I was talking about sex,' said Paul, and Willi said: 'I don't know what you mean.' He didn't. Men are far more unconscious than women about using their sex this way; far less honest.
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Doris Lessing |