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We Always Seem To Be Surprised By Events, Especially By Catastrophes, But Also By Wonderful Events. Look At 1990, The Year That The Soviet Union Collapsed And Apartheid In South Africa Collapsed And The Berlin Wall Came Down. I Don't Know Anyone Who Foresaw Those Events. It Seems To Me That As A Species We Are Constantly Trying To Adapt Ourselves To The Unexpected. In The Meantime, We Talk As If We Are In Control, And We're Not. This Seems To Me To Be The Truth About The Twentieth Century.

-Doris Lessing

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We Always Seem To

Doris Lessing

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We Always Seem To Be Surprised By Events, Especially By Catastrophes, But Also By Wonderful Events. Look At 1990, The Year That The Soviet Union Collapsed And Apartheid In South Africa Collapsed And The Berlin Wall Came Down. I Don't Know Anyone Who Foresaw Those Events. It Seems To Me That As A Species We Are Constantly Trying To Adapt Ourselves To The Unexpected. In The Meantime, We Talk As If We Are In Control, And We're Not. This Seems To Me To Be The Truth About The Twentieth Century.

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I Don't Know Much About Creative Writing Programs. But They're Not Telling The Truth If They Don't Teach, One, That Writing Is Hard Work And, Two, That You Have To Give Up A Great Deal Of Life, Your Personal Life, To Be A Writer.

My Father Was In The First World War.

I Don't Think That Women's Liberation Will Change Much Though -- Not Because There Is Anything Wrong With Their Aims, But Because It Is Already Clear That The Whole World Is Being Shaken Into A New Pattern By The Cataclysms We Are Living Through: Probably By The Time We Are Through, If We Do Get Through At All, The Aims Of Women's Liberation Will Look Very Small And Quaint.

I'm Sure That Everybody Feels A Kind Of Permanent Anguish About What's Going On In The World.

A Story Is How We Construct Our Experiences.

A Foolhardy Lot, We Accepted It All, As We Always Do, Never Asked: "what Is Going To Happen To Us Now, With This Invention Of Print?" In The Same Way, We Never Thought To Ask, "how Will Our Lives, Our Way Of Thinking, Be Changed By The Internet, Which Has Seduced A Whole Generation With Its Inanities So That Even Quite Reasonable People Will Confess That, Once They Are Hooked, It Is Hard To Cut Free, And They May Find A Whole Day Has Passed In Blogging Etc?"

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I Always Hated Tony Blair, From The Beginning.

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I Don't Know Why I Still Find It So Hard To Accept That Words Are Faulty And By Their Very Nature Innacurate

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All Political Movements Are Like This - We Are In The Right, Everyone Else Is In The Wrong. The People On Our Own Side Who Disagree With Us Are Heretics, And They Start Becoming Enemies. With It Comes An Absolute Conviction Of Your Own Moral Superiority. There's Oversimplification In Everything, And A Terror Of Flexibility.

...we Try To Have Things Both Ways. We’ve Always Refused To Live By The Book And The Rule; But Then Why Start Worrying Because The World Doesn’t Treat Us By Rule?

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I Stood Looking Down Out Of The Window. The Street Seemed Miles Down. Suddenly I Felt As If I'd Flung Myself Out Of The Window. I Could See Myself Lying On The Pavement. Then I Seemed To Be Standing By The Body On The Pavement. I Was Two People. Blood And Brains Were Scattered Everywhere. I Knelt Down And Began Licking Up The Blood And Brains

So A War Begins. Into A Peace-time Life, Comes An Announcement, A Threat. A Bomb Drops Somewhere, Potential Traitors Are Whisked Off Quietly To Prison. And For Some Time, Days, Months, A Year Perhaps, Life Has A Peace-time Quality, Into Which War-like Events Intrude. But When A War Has Been Going On For A Long Time, Life Is All War, Every Event Has The Quality Of War, Nothing Of Peace Remains.

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If We Were To Put Into Practice What We Know ... But That Is The Point.

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No One's Noticed. So Much Is Destroyed, We Can't Be Bothered.

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For She Was Of That Generation Who, Having Found Nothing In Religion, Had Formed Themselves Through Literature.

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Pleasure Resorts Are Like Film Stars And Royalty... Embarrassed By The Figures They Cut In The Fantasies Of People Who Have Never Met Them.

A Simple Grateful Thought Turned Heavenwards Is The Most Perfect Prayer.

The Most Exciting Periods Of Literature Have Always Been Those When The Critics Were Great.

We Are All Creatures Of The Stars.

Writers, And Particularly Female Writers, Have To Fight For The Conditions They Need To Work.

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It Is The Mark Of Great People To Treat Trifles As Trifles And Important Matters As Important.

It Isn't Only The Terror Everywhere, And The Fear Of Being Conscious Of It, That Freezes People. It's More Than That. People Know They Are In A Society Dead Or Dying.

It Usually Takes Me A Year To Do A Book. A Year Or Eighteen Months.

What I Did Have, Which Others Perhaps Didn't, Was A Capacity For Sticking At It, Which Really Is The Point, Not The Talent At All. You Have To Stick At It.

As Soon As I Got The Nobel Prize My Back Collapsed And I Was In Hospital.

Africa Gives You The Knowledge That Man Is A Small Creature, Among Other Creatures, In A Large Landscape.

Sometimes I Think What I Write Is Funny In Its Quiet Way.

Bed Is The Best Place For Reading, Thinking, Or Doing Nothing.

At Last I Understood That The Way Over, Or Through This Dilemma, The Unease At Writing About 'petty Personal Problems' Was To Recognize That Nothing Is Personal, In The Sense That It Is Uniquely One's Own. Writing About Oneself, One Is Writing About Others, Since Your Problems, Pains, Pleasures, Emotions—and Your Extraordinary And Remarkable Ideas—can't Be Yours Alone. [...] Growing Up Is After All Only The Understanding That One's Unique And Incredible Experience Is What Everyone Shares.

Women Are The Cowards They Are Because They Have Been Semi-slaves For So Long. The Number Of Women Prepared To Stand Up For What They Really Think, Feel, Experience, With A Man They Are In Love With Is Still Very Small.

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.

Her Own Contempt For Any Forms Of Pressure Society Might Put On Her Was So Profound And Instinctive That She As Instinctively Despised Anyone Who Paid Tribute To Them.

She Was Thirty-nine. No, She Did Not Envy Her Eighteen-year- Old Self At All. But She Did Envy, Envied Every Day More Bitterly, That Young Girl's Genuine Independence, Largeness, Scope, And Courage.

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This Is A Catastrophic Universe, Always; And Subject To Hidden Reversals, Upheavals, Changes, Cataclysms, With Joy Never Anything But The Song Of Substance Under Pressure Forced Into New Forms And Shapes.

I Spend A Good Deal Of Time Wondering How We Will Seem To The People Who Come After Us. This Is Not An Idle Interest, But A Deliberate Attempt To Strengthen The Power Of That "other Eye," Which We Can Use To Judge Ourselves.

The White Man Has Settled Like A Locust Over Africa, And, Like The Locusts In Early Morning, Cannot Take Flight For The Heaviness Of The Dew On Their Wings. But The Dew That Weights The White Man Is The Money That He Makes From Our Labor.

What Women Will Say To Other Women Grumbling In Their Kitchens And Complaining And Gossiping Or What They Make Clear In Their Masochism Is Often The Last Thing They Will Say Aloud - A Man May Overhear. Women Are The Cowards They Are Because They Have Been Semi-slaves For So Long.

What Is Charm Then? The Free Giving Of A Grace, The Spending Of Something Given By Nature In Her Role Of Spendthrift ... Something Extra, Superfluous, Unnecessary, Essentially A Power Thrown Away.

I Hate Iran. I Hate The Iranian Government. It's A Cruel And Evil Government.

I Am Increasingly Afflicted By Vertigo Where Words Mean Nothing

Words Mean Nothing

It Is My Belief...that The Talents Every Child Has, Regardless Of His Official 'i.q,' Could Stay With Him Through Life, To Enrich Him And Everybody Else, If These Talents Were Not Regarded As Commodities With A Value In The Success-stakes.

The Worst Superstition Is To Consider Our Own Tolerable.

You Should Write, First Of All, To Please Yourself. You Shouldn't Care A Damn About Anybody Else At All. But Writing Can't Be A Way Of Life - The Important Part Of Writing Is Living. You Have To Live In Such A Way That Your Writing Emerges From It.

What The Feminists Want Of Me Is Something They Haven't Examined Because It Comes From Religion. They Want Me To Bear Witness.

Living In A Small Town Anywhere Means Preserving One's Self Behind A Mask.

What They [critics Of Lessing's Switch To Science Fiction] Didn't Realize Was That In Science Fiction Is Some Of The Best Social Fiction Of Our Time.

It Is Terrible To Destroy A Person's Picture Of Himself In The Interests Of Truth Or Some Other Abstraction.

When The Print Revolution Occurred 400 Years Ago, Human Beings Lost A Certain Mental Capacity, Including A Sense Of Memory. In Africa Today, You Meet People Who Still Carry Everything In Their Heads, The Way We Used To. We Rely On Telephone Books, Address Books. We Have To Look Up Everything.

I Think Kids Ought To Travel. I Think It's Very Good To Carry Kids Around. It's Good For Them. Of Course It's Tough On The Parents.

What Matters Most Is That We Learn From Living.

I'm Very Unhappy When I'm Not Writing.

Nonsense, It Was All Nonsense: This Whole Damned Outfit, With Its Committees, Its Conferences, Its Eternal Talk, Talk, Talk, Was A Great Con Trick; It Was A Mechanism To Earn A Few Hundred Men And Women Incredible Sums Of Money.

It's Amazing What You Find Out About Yourself When You Write In The First Person About Someone Very Different From You.

Does Political Correctness Have A Good Side? Yes, It Does, For It Makes Us Re-examine Attitudes, And That Is Always Useful. The Trouble Is That, With All Popular Movements, The Lunatic Fringe So Quickly Ceases To Be A Fringe; The Tail Begins To Wag The Dog. For Every Woman Or Man Who Is Quietly And Sensibly Using The Idea To Examine Our Assumptions, There Are Twenty Rabble-rousers Whose Real Motive Is Desire For Power Over Others. The Fact That They See Themselves As Antiracists Or Feminists Or Whatever Does Not Make Them Any Less Rabble-rousers.

I Think I Am At The End Of A Certain Phase Of My Life. What I'm On The Lookout For Now Is The Unexpected, For Things That Come From Outside And That I Never Thought Might Happen. Sometimes You Have To Watch For Them So You Don't Automatically Say No To The New, Simply Because You're In The Habit Of Saying No To Everything That Comes Along. I'm Constantly Changing My Perspective On My Own Life. I See The Past Differently, And That's A Wonderful Thing.

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.

I Don't Think San Francisco Needs Defending. I Never Meet Anyone Who Doesn't Love The Place, Americans Or Others.

I'm Going To Make The Obvious Point That Maybe The Word Neurotic Means The Condition Of Being Highly Conscious And Developed. The Essence Of Neurosis Is Conflict. But The Essence Of Living Now, Fully, Not Blocking Off To What Goes On, Is Conflict. In Fact I've Reached The Stage Where I Look At People And Say - He Or She, They Are Whole At All Because They've Chosen To Block Off At This Stage Or That. People Stay Sane By Blocking Off, By Limiting Themselves.

You Have To Be Grown Up, Really Grown Up, Not Merely In Years, To Understand Your Parents.

Don't Read A Book Out Of Its Right Time For You.

When I Became Political And Communist, It Was Because They Were The Only People I Had Ever Met Who Fought The Color Bar In Their Lives.

Bad Luck For Both Of Us, We Are Both Boulder-pushers.

The Older I Get The More Secrets I Have, Never To Be Revealed And This, I Know, Is A Common Condition Of People My Age. And Why All This Emphasis On Kissing And Telling? Kisses Are The Least Of It.

The Critics Slap Labels On You And Then Expect You To Talk Inside Their Terms.

When I Was Starting Out, Science Fiction Was A Little Genre Over There, Which Only A Few People Read. But Now -- Where Are You Going To Put, For Example, Salman Rushdie? Or Any Of The South American Writers? Most People Get By Calling Them Magical Realists.

The Smell Of Manure, Of Sun On Foliage, Of Evaporating Water, Rose To My Head; Two Steps Farther, And I Could Look Down Into The Vegetable Garden Enclosed Within Its Tall Pale Of Reeds - Rich Chocolate Earth Studded Emerald Green, Frothed With The White Of Cauliflowers, Jeweled With The Purple Globes Of Eggplant And The Scarlet Wealth Of Tomatoes.

...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.

What Of Course I Would Like To Be Writing Is The Story Of The Red And White Dwarves And Their Remembering Mirror, Their Space Rocket (powered By Anti-gravity), Their Attendant Entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, And Muon, And The Charmed Quarks And The Coloured Quarks. But We Can't All Be Physicists.

They Can't Give A Nobel To Someone Who's Dead So I Think They Were Probably Thinking They Had Better Give It To Me Now.

America Can Be A Very Hysterical Country Intellectually And Very Puritanical, Too. You Probably Have Fun In Private, But To The Rest Of The World You Seem To Hate Fun - To Be Big On Agendas And Short On Spontaneity. The Image You Present Is One Of Appalling Conformity. The Thought Police Is What You Are Ruled By.

The Human Community Is Evolving... . We Can Survive Anything You Care To Mention. We Are Supremely Equipped To Survive, To Adapt And Even In The Long Run To Start Thinking.

Trust No Friend Without Faults, And Love A Woman, But No Angel.

Often The Mass Emotions Are Those Which Seem The Noblest, Best And Most Beautiful. And Yet, Inside A Year, Five Years, A Decade, Five Decades, People Will Be Asking, "how Could You Have Believed That?" Because Events Will Have Taken Place That Will Have Banished The Said Mass Emotions To The Dustbin Of History.

And Then, Not Expecting It, You Become Middle-aged And Anonymous. No One Notices You. You Achieve A Wonderful Freedom. It Is A Positive Thing. You Can Move About Unnoticed And Invisible.

If You Understand Something, You Don't Forgive It, You Are The Thing Itself: Forgiveness Is For What You Don't Understand.

Dreams Have Always Been My Friend, Full Of Information, Full Of Warnings.

Men Are Unwise And Curiously Planned.

If She Had Been Left Alone She Would Have Gone On, In Her Own Way, Enjoying Herself Thoroughly, Until People Found One Day That She Had Turned Imperceptibly Into One Of Those Women Who Have Become Old Without Ever Having Been Middle Aged: A Little Withered, A Little Acid, Hard As Nails, Sentimentally Kindhearted, And Addicted To Religion Or Small Dogs.

Think Wrongly, If You Please, But In All Cases Think For Yourself.

The Golden Notebook For Some Reason Surprised People But It Was No More Than You Would Hear Women Say In Their Kitchens Every Day In Any Country... I Was Really Astounded That Some People Were Shocked.

Coincidences Are God's Way Of Remaining Anonymous.

Charity Has Always Been A Expression Of The Guilty Consciences Of A Ruling Class.

Every Spendthrift Passion Has Its Attendant Courtiers.

I Am Sure Everyone Has Had The Experience Of Reading A Book And Finding It Vibrating With Aliveness, With Colour And Immediacy. And Then, Perhaps Some Weeks Later, Reading It Again And Finding It Flat And Empty. Well, The Book Hasn't Changed: You Have.

Because I Was Permanently Confused, Dissatisfied, Unhappy, Tormented By Inadequacy, Driven By Wanting Towards Every Kind Of Impossible Future, The Attitude Of Mind Described By 'tolerantly Amused Eyes' Was Years Away From Me. I Don't Think I Really Saw People Then, Except As Appendages To My Needs. It's Only Now, Looking Back, That I Understood, But At The Time I Lived In A Brilliantly Lit Haze, Shifting And Flickering According To My Changing Desires. Of Course, That Is Only A Description Of Being Young.

There Was A Time When Young People Respected Learning And Literature And Now They Don't.

For Women Like Me, Integrity Isn't Chastity, It Isn't Fidelity, It Isn't Any Of The Old Words. Integrity Is The Orgasm. That Is Something I Haven't Any Control Over.

Space Or Science Fiction Has Become A Dialect For Our Time.

In University They Don't Tell You That The Greater Part Of The Law Is Learning To Tolerate Fools.

After A Certain Age - And For Some Of Us That Can Be Very Young - There Are No New People, Beasts, Dreams, Faces, Events: It Has All Happened Before.

The Whole Process Of Writing Is A Setting At A Distance. That Is The Value Of It - To The Writer, And To The People Who Read The Results Of This Process, Which Takes The Raw, The Individual, The Uncriticized, The Unexamined, Into The Realm Of The General.

I'm Always Astounded At The Way We Automatically Look At What Divides And Separates Us. We Never Look At What People Have In Common. If You See It, Black And White People, Both Sides Look To See The Differences, They Don't Look At What They Have Together. Men And Women, And Old And Young, And So On. And This Is A Disease Of The Mind, The Way I See It. Because In Actual Fact, Men And Women Have Much More In Common Than They Are Separated.

Black And White

You Know, When I Was A Girl, The Idea That The British Empire Could Ever End Was Absolutely Inconceivable. And It Just Disappeared, Like All The Other Empires.

What's Terrible Is To Pretend That Second-rate Is First-rate. To Pretend That You Don't Need Love When You Do; Or You Like Your Work When You Know Quite Well You're Capable Of Better.

The Nobel Prize Is Run By A Self-perpetuated Committee. They Vote For Themselves And Get The World's Publishing Industry To Jump To Their Tune.

If What We Think Now Is Different From What We Thought Then, We Can Take It For Granted That What We Think In A Year Will Be Different Again.

The 1960s Was Probably The First Time In History That Young People Were Recognized As A Big Group Of Consumers And As A Commercial Proposition For Madison Avenue. Advertising Played A Major Role In Creating The Ethos Of That Era - The Idea That, "here It Is, And You Can Have It Now." I Know That Many Kids Thought That The Ethos Of The 1960s Was Due To Their Own Peculiar Virtues, But, In Fact, It Had A Lot To Do With The Realities Of The Marketplace And Commerce.

Women Are Slaves To Their Beauty.

Perhaps It Is A Fault Of The Species Who Thrive In Peace, Mutual Help, Aspirations For More Of The Same -- To Forget That Outside These Borders Dwell Very Different Types Of Mind, Feeding On Different Fuel.

I Don't Think That The Feminist Movement Has Done Much For The Characters Of Women.

In The Writing Process, The More The Story Cooks, The Better. The Brain Works For You Even When You Are At Rest. I Find Dreams Particularly Useful. I Myself Think A Great Deal Before I Go To Sleep And The Details Sometimes Unfold In The Dream.

Whatever You're Meant To Do, Do It Now. The Conditions Are Always Impossible.

There Are No Laws For The Novel. There Never Have Been, Nor Can There Ever Be.

In Fact I've Reached The Stage Where I Look At People And Say - He Or She, They Are Whole At All Because They've Chosen To Block Off At This Stage Or That. People Stay Sane By Blocking Off, By Limiting Themselves.

We Do Not Know Which Of Our Silver Products Will Be Judged As Gold By Our Successors, Nor Does It Matter.

I Wasn't An Active Feminist In The '60s, Never Have Been.

All Politicians Are Not The Same. I've Never Felt That Way. What Is The Same Is That Voters Get Very Excited About New Faces, Like Clinton And Blair - And They Have Unrealistic Expectations That The World Will Change Overnight. A Cynical Old Hand Like Myself Knows That It Won't.

I Wonder Why Do Wars Suddenly Start And Suddenly Stop, And Why Do We Brits And You Americans Get Involved In Some Of Them And Not In Others? Is It Possible That The Arms Manufacturers Quietly Foment Wars Without Us Knowing? Dropping Bombs Is A Very Profitable Business For Them. Gore Vidal Was Talking About This The Other Day, And He Made A Lot Of Sense. Whenever American Policy Seems Inscrutable, He Said, Remember The Military-industrial Complex. He's The One Who Should Have Been President.

[the Golden Notebook] Was Not A Trumpet For Women's Liberation. It Described Many Female Emotions Of Aggression, Hostility, Resentment. It Put Them Into Print. Apparently What Many Women Were Thinking, Feeling, Experiencing, Came As A Great Surprise. Instantly A Lot Of Very Ancient Weapons Were Unleashed, The Main Ones, As Usual, Being On The Theme Of "she Is Unfeminine", "she Is A Man-hater".

When You Look At My Life, You Can Go Back To The Late 1930s, What I Saw Was, First Of All, Hitler, He Was Going To Live Forever. Mussolini Was In For 10,000 Years. You Had The Soviet Union, Which Was, By Definition, Going To Last Forever. There Was The British Empire -- Nobody Imagined It Could Come To An End. So Why Should One Believe In Any Kind Of Permanence?

You Are Taken, Shaken, By Moments When The Improbability Of Our Lives Comes Over You Like A Fever. Everything Is Remarkable, People, Living, Events Present Themselves To You With The Immediacy Of Players In Some Barbarous And Splendid Drama That It Seems We Are Part Of. You Have Been Given New Eyes.

Any Human Anywhere Will Blossom In A Hundred Unexpected Talents And Capacities Simply By Being Given The Opportunity To Do So.

Intelligence Forbids Tears.

Do You Know What People Really Want? Everyone, I Mean. Everybody In The World Is Thinking: I Wish There Was Just One Other Person I Could Really Talk To, Who Could Really Understand Me, Who'd Be Kind To Me. That's What People Really Want, If They're Telling The Truth.

It Can Be Considered A Rule That The Probable Duration Of An Empire May Be Prognosticated By The Degree To Which Its Rulers Believe In Their Own Propaganda.

What Is A Hero Without Love For Mankind.

We Have Not Yet Developed A System Of Education That Is Not A System Of Indoctrination.

I Never Stopped Reading.

We Are Several People Fitted Inside Each Other. Chinese Boxes. Our Bodies Are The Outside Box. Or The Inside One If You Like.

There Is Only One Real Sin And That Is To Persuade Oneself That The Second Best Is Anything But Second Best.

There's Always This Sense Of Incredulity That Writers Feel, Because They're Usually Living Flat And Ordinary Lives, Because They Have To.

The First Casualty In Any War Is The Truth. In World War Ii, I Was Part Of A Group Of People Who Used To Meet Once A Week With The Sole Purpose Of Analyzing The News And Trying To Work Out What We Weren't Being Told. We Thought That We Were Clever, But We Had Absolutely No Idea What Was Really Going On. It Was Only Years Later That We Learned The True Story.

A Public Library Is The Most Democratic Thing In The World. What Can Be Found There Has Undone Dictators And Tyrants.

I Often Feel Like A Dinosaur. I Don't Get The Technology Thing At All. I Was On The Internet Not Long Ago For Barnes And Noble, And People Were Ringing Up From All Over The World - Australia, Canada, France. I Experienced It As An Informal Chat, Which Was Pleasant, But I Couldn't Quite Take It In. It Had A Strong Element Of Unreality. I Can't Be Bothered To Switch To A Computer At My Age, Though I Might Get Along With E-mail, Which Sounds Appealing.

Art Is The Mirror Of Our Betrayed Ideals.

You Know, Whenever Women Make Imaginary Female Kingdoms In Literature, They Are Always Very Permissive, To Use The Jargon Word, And Easy And Generous And Self-indulgent, Like The Relationships Between Women When There Are No Men Around. They Make Each Other Presents, And They Have Little Feasts, And Nobody Punishes Anyone Else. This Is The Female Way Of Going Along When There Are No Men About Or When Men Are Not In The Ascendant.

I Do Not Think Writers Or Anybody Would Sit Down And Think They Must Write About Some Cause, Or Theme, Or Something. If They Write About Their Own Experiences, Something True Is Going To Emerge.

We Spend Our Lives Fighting To Get People Very Slightly More Stupid Than Ourselves To Accept Truths That The Great Men Have Always Known.

...or Like An Old Friend One Has Known Too Well And Doesn't Want To See.

My Father Was Always So Mingled With Rage At His Life.

The Youth Do Not See The Old. They Are Not Programmed To See The Old, Who Are Cancelled, Negated, Wiped Out.

Thought Provoking

People Are Just Cannibals Unless They Leave Each Other Alone.

Golden Notebook

Remember That The Book Which Bores You When You Are Twenty Or Thirty Will Open Doors For You When You Are Forty Or Fifty - And Vise Versa. Don’t Read A Book Out Of Its Right Time For You.

I've Won All The Prizes In Europe, Every Bloody One. I'm Delighted To Win Them All, The Whole Lot.

There Is A Great Line Of Women Stretching Out Behind You Into The Past, And You Have To Seek Them Out And Find Them In Yourself And Be Conscious Of Them.

I Have Kept Diaries, Of Course, But They Can't Be Read For Quite A Long Time. I'm Always Curious About People Who Are Fascinated By Writers' Lives. It Seems To Me That We're Always In Our Books, Quite Nakedly. I Wonder, Too, Does The Private Life Really Matter? Who Cares What Is Known About You And What Isn't? Even When You Make Public Something That's Been Private, Most People Don't Get It - Not Unless They're The Same Generation And Have Gone Through More Or Less The Same Experiences. So, In A Sense, We're All Private, By Definition.

I Am A Person Who Continually Destroys The Possibilities Of A Future Because Of The Numbers Of Alternative Viewpoints I Can Focus On The Present.

I Have A Daughter And Two Grand-daughters And A Great Grandson In Africa, In Cape Town.

The Words Of A Wise Man's Mouth Are Gracious; But The Lips Of A Fool Will Swallow Up Himself.

The World Is Only Tolerable Because Of The Empty Places In It...when The World's Filled Up, We'll Have To Get Hold Of A Star. Any Star. Venus, Or Mars. Get Hold Of It And Leave It Empty. Man Needs An Empty Space Somewhere For His Spirit To Rest In.

When Old Settlers Say 'one Has To Understand The Country,' What They Mean Is, 'you Have To Get Used To Our Ideas About The Native.' They Are Saying In Effect, 'learn Our Ideas, Or Otherwise Get Out; We Don't Want You.'

Perhaps It Is Not Such A Bad Marriage After All? There Are Innumerable Marriages Where Two People, Both Twisted And Wrong In Their Depths, Are Well Matched, Making Each Other Miserable In The Way They Need, In The Way The Pattern Of Their Life Demands.

People Who Love Literature Have At Least Part Of Their Minds Immune From Indoctrination. If You Read, You Can Learn To Think For Yourself.

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Shigeru Miyamoto

Dag Hammarskjold

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