The Grass Is Singing

by Doris Lessing

Did he intend to go on fighting in the dark for the sake of a principle? And if so, which principle?

It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. How can one know he will be able to create another to enable him to go on living?

perpetual demand for the next thing.

What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

indulgent uxoriousness.

The red spread out from the center of the sky, seemed to tinge the smoke haze over the kopjes, and to light the trees with a hot sulphurous yellow. The world was a miracle of color, and all for her, all for her! She could have wept with release and lighthearted joy. And then she heard it, that sound she could never bear, the first cicada beginning to shrill somewhere in the trees. It was the sound of the sun itself, and how she hated the sun!