This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run ever… - Doris Lessing

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.

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.