##Lessing24
The two women were alone in the London flat.
- Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

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November 2, 2024 at 2:06 AM
I have been thinking of the novels about the break-down of language, like Finnegans Wake. And the preoccupation with semantics.
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November 13, 2024 at 1:23 AM
Wow. Published in 1962.
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I sat there, discouraged and depressed. Because in all of us brought up in a Western democracy there is this built-in belief that freedom and liberty will strengthen, will survive pressures, and the belief seems to survive any evidence against it. This belief is probably in itself a danger (496).
November 25, 2024 at 10:49 PM
She used an old-fashioned music stool for this occupation, and she now spun it high, almost as high as the table itself, and sat, looking down at the four notebooks as if she were a general on the top of a mountain, watching her armies deploy in the valley below.

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November 3, 2024 at 7:01 PM
I keep four notebooks, a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer, a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary.
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November 19, 2024 at 9:43 PM
If people can imagine something, there'll come a time when they'll achieve it."

"Imagine what?"

"What you said-goodness. Kindness. The end of being animals."
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November 11, 2024 at 10:33 PM
I can't pick up a newspaper without what's in it seeming so overwhelmingly terrible that nothing I could write would seem to have any point at all?" "Then you shouldn't read the newspapers." I laughed. After a while she smiled with me.
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November 10, 2024 at 3:22 PM
Look at us all sitting here, with not a word to say. It’s a dangerous place, Mashopi. We’ll come here, week-end after week-end and hibernate in all this beer and moonlight and good food. Where will it all end I ask you?

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November 6, 2024 at 3:09 AM
Ella found herself in the grip of a sensation which, when she examined it, turned out to be loneliness. loneliness. It was as if,between her &the groups of people, were a space of cold air, an emotional vacuum. The sensation was of physical cold,of physical isolation.
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November 13, 2024 at 8:32 PM
For children like Janet the fabric of security is woven, not of grandparents, cousins, a settled home; but that friends telephone every day, and certain words are spoken.
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November 11, 2024 at 10:33 PM
Give a like to join #Lessing24 #DorisLessing #TheGoldenNotebook starting November 1st!
October 24, 2024 at 1:50 PM
They were extraordinarily beautiful. As far as we could see, the blue air was graced with white wings. And looking down into a distant vlei, the butterflies were a white glittering haze over green grass.

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November 19, 2024 at 5:56 AM
And she continued to write the novel, making excuses such as: “Well, there’s no need to get it published, I’ll just write it for myself.” And in speaking of it to friends, she would joke: “But everyone I know is writing a novel.”

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November 8, 2024 at 6:10 AM
The difference between a red in Europe and a red in America is that in Europe a red is a communist; but in America he is a man who has never taken out a Party card out of caution or cowardice.
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November 29, 2024 at 10:59 PM
Because, unconsciously, I was defending myself against the pain of knowledge. (Yet with my intelligence I don't care, it's the creature inside me who cares, who is jealous, who sulks and wants to hurt back.)
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November 24, 2024 at 8:41 PM
Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
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November 24, 2024 at 8:40 PM
It was true that with Paul she had taught herself never to look at a man, even casually, because of his jealousy; she was, with him, like a protected indoors woman from a Latin country.
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November 13, 2024 at 1:23 AM
The complacent smile, the tolerant nod, is not even confined to the culti vated healers, or the professors; it's the property of the money-changers, the little jackals of the press, the enemy.
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November 3, 2024 at 12:39 PM
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James Wood on what's wrong with contemporary novels, in this week's New Yorker: "Most contemporary novels are too narrow to allow for the truly dialogical: autofiction is a bedroom rather than an arena. 2/
November 17, 2024 at 6:06 PM
Anna had underlined the word “freedom” whenever it occurred, in red pencil. Where the cuttings ceased, she had added up the red lines, making a total of 679 references to the word freedom.

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November 25, 2024 at 5:10 AM
But now, suddenly, the tiny blonde woman (who has drunk at least three-quarters of a bottle of Scotch and is as cool and controlled as a soft little kitten with sweet, just-open misty blue eyes) gets up and says: “Bill, Bill, I want to dance. I want to dance, baby.”

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November 24, 2024 at 6:07 AM
Because everyone’s got used to the idea of whole countries changing completely in about three years—like China or Russia. And if they can’t see a complete change ahead, they can’t be bothered … do you think that’s true?

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November 12, 2024 at 3:55 AM
“England. Coming back this time was worse than usual. I felt the energy coming out of me even on the boat. I walked into the shops yesterday and I looked at the nice, decent faces, everyone so kind, and so decent and so bloody dull.”

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#Lessing24
November 3, 2024 at 6:37 PM