What you don’t understand is, people never believe these things. Not until they experience them. Then when they experience them they become people ot… - Doris Lessing

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality, into which war-like events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains. Events and the life in which they are embedded have the same quality. But since it is not possible that events are not part of the life they occur in — it is not possible that a bomb should explode into a texture of life foreign to it — all that means is that one has not understood, one has not been watching.