It was OK, us being Reds during the war, because we were all on the same side. But then the Cold War started. Almost overnight we became enemies of p… - Doris Lessing

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

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.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.