Re Quotes

“We are all creatures of the stars.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“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 their station in life—but an acknowledgement of the existence of irony: yes, they may sometimes allow themselves—always with respect—the mildest possible grimace of irony.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“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 instance—but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“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.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“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.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“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.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“They turned into wrong and destructive paths believing that they were better than others whose belief in self-interest was open and expressed, better because they, and they alone, knew how the practical affairs of the planet should be conducted. An emotional reaction to the sufferings of Shikasta seemed to them a sufficient qualification for curing them.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta

“Even the most sketchily educated and ill-informed youngster had at his or her fingertips facts that had to contradict, in all kinds of ways, obvious and implicit, the propagandas which afflicted them.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta

“...a family wanting no more than to live without challenge or drama could easily find a quiet street, and "peace," provided they were fortunate enough to live in a comparatively sheltered and favoured geographical area, and provided they were able to make the mental adjustment to relegate war - and its consequences - into something that happened elsewhere and did not affect them; or something that had happened to them, but between such and such dates, and then taken itself off.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“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”.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“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.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“Facts. England. The first two times we children visited it were before the Dictatorship, and there was nothing much to notice but things being inefficient. But the third time, food was short, even though it was on a farm, and Mr Jones and Mrs Jones were worried. I have been asking Simon and Olga and they say that a lot of people were in prison and people got arrested suddenly and then vanished. Well, there’s nothing new in that. And the people who couldn’t get work, particularly the young ones, were rampaging about. That was before they were put in armies and kept in camps. Wales and Scotland were the same, although they were Independent. The Dictatorship was trying to be all English, and not to have so many foreigners. When George went for his year farming, it was hard to arrange. Travel got difficult after the Dictatorship and anyway, people couldn’t afford it.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“These might work, fight, even commit crimes to get “their” representatives into power, but after that they did not consider they had any responsibility for their choices. For a feature, perhaps a predominant feature of the inhabitants of this planet, was that their broken minds allowed them to hold, and act on—even forcibly and violently—opinions and sets of mind that a short time later—years, a month, even a few minutes—they might utterly repudiate.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta

“I wonder if you have to spend your whole life suddenly understanding facts that were perfectly obvious all the time.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta

“Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born - and yet in each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from his low half-animal state to true humanity. Each one of them with this potential, and yet so few can be reached, to make the leap.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“Everything, their thoughts and movements … they were suspended, on this earth, between earth and heaven, and through them flowed the lives of stars, and through them flowed the substance of the earth to the stars.…”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta

“There is something else, and stronger than anything: the well-being, the always renewing, regenerative, healing force of nature; feeling one with the other creatures of Shikasta and its soil, and its plants. The lowest, the most downtrodden, the most miserable of Shikastans, will watch the wind moving a plant, and smile; will plant a seed and watch it grow; will stand to watch the life of the clouds. Or lie pleasurably awake in the dark, hearing wind howl that cannot—not this time—harm him where he lies safe. This is where strength has always welled, irrepressibly, into every creature of Shikasta.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta

“It is not necessary, most of the time, to direct an individual into this or that relationship or situation – components of his or her personality, aspects of themselves they may not be aware of at all, will push them, by the laws of attraction or repulsion, into the places, or near to the people, who will benefit them. Very often two people, or a group of people, may meet in forceful and beneficial situations, and onlookers may even cry out that this must be the result of a ‘miracle’ or ‘divine intervention’. The couple, or group, have been drawn to each other sometimes across oceans, or overcoming ‘impossible’ hazards, because they need each other – need to learn from each other. But often this process, to the uninstructed onlooker, seems like a meaningless or wasted conflict, or a stalemate, or even damaging.

“And of course sometimes such encounters are indeed mistaken, wasteful, damaging. How could it be otherwise on poor Shikasta, in its extremity, at the end of the long processes that have brought it to such a shameful state?”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“I understood that I was understanding. I could have understood before, that when George is with Hasan and Hasan is talking, George is hearing things in what Hasan is saying that are quite beyond me. That I can’t hear at all. I could see from George’s face that in quite ordinary things that were said was much much more. I just couldn’t grasp it. It was going too fast for me. It was above my head. The conversation was apparently about not very much. I was thinking in an agonized sort of way, that they weren’t talking about anything important or special. Yet George’s face kept lighting up as he understood the things that were there.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“It began to dawn on me then ... all the time I was being reminded of something, I didn’t know quite what, and I was lying awake every night trying to remember what it was, and even now I can’t say much about it, but it is like what the other Rachel, and Olga, and Simon, used to tell me of how the three were taught by people just coming past, and how they learned things without there being actual lessons and timetables most of the time. I keep meeting people, and all of them seem to know at once who I am and what to tell me or where to take me. That is very peculiar. Something peculiar is going on, but I don’t know what.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“The way to understand something is to watch what is happening. The results are the explanation.”
― Doris Lessing, Shikasta

“scarcely born, and then adult, and then old, and then dead.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta

“Because 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. Or even a month the way my thoughts are changing at the moment. Your thoughts are the last thing you can rely on.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta

“I suddenly saw her quite differently. I saw that she was a person. Not my mother. She had thought it all out. She had wanted to commit suicide. She would never commit suicide. On that night I grew up. Or so I would like to believe.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta