What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowf...ul disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough wonder if our lives, or some events ...and times in our lives, may not be analogues or metaphors or echoes of evolvements and happenings going on in other people?--or animals?--even forests or oceans or rocks?--in this world of ours or, even, in worlds or dimensions elsewhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ... An economy entirely geared to war ...... but there is not much war ... hardly any fighting ... yet every man a soldier from birth till death ... Men ... all men for fighting ... but no war, no wars to fight ... what is it, what does it mean?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So that this beautiful realm of hers was held in her mind extended, or lengthened: it had been finite, bounded, known utterly and ...in every detail, self-enclosed ... but now it lapped and rippled out and upwards beyond there into hinterlands that were like unknown possibilities in her own mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anyone could lick a child all over as if it were a puppy or a kitten--but where had that thought come from? What a strange thing t...o come into her mind! And anyone could clutch at a child and mark its features: "This nose is mine, and that his, and that my mother's, and that his father's ..." Anybody, even a horse or a dog, could calculate streams of inheritance in that way. And all that was pleasant enough, and of course no one would refuse the delights of watching for the appearance of this or that trait in a child. But that was not even the half of it ... one might not, most definitely could not, say of a child, "mine, mine," or "ours, ours,"Mmeaning, only, parenthood. For what was real and fine and precious in this new being was in relation only with ... somewhere else ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I did not lose my Sirian perspectives, the Sirian scope of time and space. But I was inside, too, this civilisation's view of itse...lf as all there was of the known world--for on its edges were, to the north, the threatening horsemen, to the northwest, very far away, dark forests full of barbarians whom these people scarcely accounted as human at all, believing them not much more than beasts--and from their point of view, accurately--... The world as understood by this great and powerful Queen was, though it stretched from one end of the main landmass to the other, circumscribed indeed, and the stars that roofed it were understood only--and to a limited extend--by their influences on their movements ... on our movements ... an odd, a startling, a disturbing, clash of focusses and perspectives encompassed me; and as for the historical aspect, this queen knew the story of her own civilisation and some legends, mostly inaccurate, of a "distant" past, which to me, and my mind, was virtually contemporary with her.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People k...now they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for info...rmation about areas of life we don't know--Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel--the quality of philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a ...few days before, words like democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of understanding of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power. I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I.I.I.I. of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war; and I knew how strong these emotions were, in a way that would never leave me, would become part of how I saw the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women of the tradition to which Alice and Martha belonged are prepared to discuss menstruation or pregnancy in the frankest of det...ail, but it is taboo to discuss sex, notwithstanding the show of frankness the subject is surrounded with. It follows that they get their information about how other women react sexually from their men, a system which has its disadvantages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »