Walking in the Shade Quotes

“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.”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“The appetite for saints of either sex, gurus, wise women and men, is unappeasable, and this means that the most unlikely material becomes sanctified. I myself have had to fight off attempts to turn me into a wise old woman. All that happens is that disillusioned fans and disciples attack unfairly where once they unwisely venerated.”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“The media are the equivalent of yesterday's scientists, for today's scientists have seen that when they conduct an experiment they are part of it and influence results by their very being; the media can create a story, a scandal, an event, but behave as if they have nothing to do with it, as if the event or the reputation were a spontaneous happening and they haven't influenced the result, or invented it all in the first place. 'The general interest in ... continues and is growing.' Of course it is, since the journalists are fanning the flames, permitting themselves fits of moral indignation, excitement, concern. Meanwhile the public marvel at them.”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“We said that when we read in the reports of their assemblies that Comrade Stalin had spoken for five hours and the applause lasted for half an hour, we were incredulous. In our culture – we boasted – there could not be this kind of reverence for a leader. In fact, the very word ‘leader’ was an embarrassment. Decades later, with what chagrin did I read, during the reign of Thatcher, ‘wild applause for fifteen minutes’. Thus does Time punish our arrogances.”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“People have forgotten how badly the refugees from Spain were treated, kept in camps near the border for years, as if they were criminals, to be punished. Well into the sixties, there were a couple of pubs in Soho where intensely poor Spaniards met to talk about how the world had forgotten them, and yet they had been the first to stand up to the Nazis, to the fascists.”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“You know that the British are never happier than when on the top of some dangerous mountain, or crossing the Atlantic in a cockleshell, or alone in a desert, or deep in a jungle. Indomitable is the word. Self-sufficing. Solitude-loving. And yet a group of these same people, in England, seems cosy, seems insular, and, confronted by an alien, they huddle together, presenting the faces of alarmed children. There is an innocence, something unlived, often summarized by: ‘You see, Britain hasn’t been invaded for hundreds of years.’ There is a dinkiness, a smallness, a tameness, a deep, instinctive, perennial refusal to admit danger, or even the unfamiliar: a reluctance to understand extreme experience.”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“What I could have explored is how the human mind – our minds – continually try to soften and hide bad experience, by deliberately forgetting or distorting. The way not only individual minds, but collective minds – a country’s, a continent’s – will forget a horror. The most famous example is the Great Flu Epidemic of 1919–1920, when twenty-nine million people all over the world died, but it is left out of the history books, is not in the collective consciousness. Humanity’s mind is set to forget disaster. That was the contention of Velikovsky, whose story of our solar system’s possible history is dismissed by the professionals, though surely some of what he said has turned out to be true. There is certainly nothing in the human consciousness of the successive calamitous ice ages, and we – humanity – lived through more than one. There are glimpses in old tales of great floods, but that is about it. In the book which I failed to write would be implicit the question: Is it a good thing that every generation decides to forget the bad or cruel experience of the one before? That the Great War (for instance), such a calamity for Europe, became the ‘Great Unmentionable’ – which made my father and other soldiers, of France and Germany, feel as if they were being nullified, discounted, were just so much human rubbish. That five or six years after that terrible civil war in Southern Rhodesia, the new young generation had forgotten and ‘didn’t want to know’. Well … it could have been a good book.”
― Doris Lessing , Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“First of all, the National Health Service, the Welfare State. What pride in it, what elation – and what confidence! The best thing was still the young doctors setting up group practices. Most but not all were socialists of various kinds. Memories of the thirties were close, documented by The Stars Look Down, Love on the Dole, The Citadel, novels which everyone had read. Whole families could be brought low because of the illness of one member. That terrible poverty in the 1930s, that cruel indifference to suffering on the part of Britain’s rulers – but now there was the welfare state. Pensions meant old age was no longer a threat. (Forty years later a government can say blandly, But we can’t afford it – and cut benefits that the citizens imagined they had been paying for. Has anyone ever thought of suing a government that reneges on its promises?”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“My lot were shocked and disturbed, for we thought, if you are not ‘politically conscious’, then you get what you deserve – Hitler, at least. That some of the most politically conscious generations in history had got Stalin was not a thought we could yet accommodate.”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“At the end of a century of grand revolutionary romanticism; frightful sacrifices for the sake of paradises and heavens on earth and the withering away of the state; passionate dreams of Utopias and wonderlands and perfect cities; attempts at communes and commonwealths, at co-operatives and kibbutzes and kolkhozes – after all this, would any of us have believed that most people in the world would settle gratefully for a little honesty, a little competence in government?”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“Alex was not the only person I’ve heard say that being forced to lie in bed with nothing to do for months was the best thing that ever happened to him. In his case, it was TB. He read all the time he was in the sanatorium, and came out looking back with pity on the ignorant youth he had been.”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“The thing is, people who are indeed frothing mad, if they are in political or religious contexts are not seen as mad. Yet if the same people were in a different context, it would be seen at once. But some people who are crazy drift towards political or religious movements where their craziness will not be seen, and whether they do this consciously or not surely doesn’t matter.”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962

“After all, this situation, a similar one, is bound to roll around again, in a different context, a different history. Everything does. And the next time, will we (humankind) recognise it and do better?”
― Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962