161
" 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 story that began, 'Once upon a time there was a little girl called Alice, with her mother, Dorothy. One morning Alice was in the kitchen with Dorothy, who was making her favourite pudding, apple with cinnamon and brown sugar and sour cream, and little Alice said, 'Mummy, I am a good girl, aren't I? "
― Doris Lessing , The Good Terrorist
163
" 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
164
" 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 ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence. "
― Doris Lessing , The Golden Notebook
172
" I tried to think about it, my brain kept swimming into blankness, I got confused and exhausted. Michael came in, very late. I told him what I was trying to think out. After all, he’s a witch-doctor, a soul-curer. He looked at me, very dry and ironic, and remarked: ‘My dear Anna, the human soul, sitting in a kitchen, or for that matter, in a double bed, is quite complicated enough, we don’t understand the first thing about it. Yet you’re sitting there worrying because you can’t make sense of the human soul in the middle of a world revolution?’ And so I left it, and I was glad to, but I was nevertheless feeling guilty because I was so happy not to think about it. "
― Doris Lessing , The Golden Notebook
177
" THE YEAR OF MIRACLES, 1990
A young woman is on a plane coming from the Eastern Mediterranean, and is joined by a man who says, ‘Tell me what’s been happening in the world. I’ve been in the Himalayas for months, and I’ve not seen a newspaper nor heard the news. Thank God.’
‘Well now, let me see’, says she. ‘The Soviet Union has given up communism, the Soviet colonies have given up the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall is down and Germany is united. In South Africa they have given up apartheid.’
‘Very funny’, says he, ‘and now tell me what has really happened. "
― Doris Lessing , African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe
180
" It was a grief and a fear too ancient for me, it was a sorrow bred into the essence of the race. I saluted it, and passed on, for like the early all-pervading nausea, this was part of my living, kneaded into my fibres, a necessity like breathing and associated with it: this cold, this weight, this pulling and dragging and compelling. It was too old a lodestone for any individual to fight away from, or even to accurately know or place. It was there. [...] There it lay, just out of sight, deadly and punishing, for its pulse was that of a cold heaviness, it had to be a counterweight to joy. "
― Doris Lessing , Briefing for a Descent Into Hell