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Book: Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
Quotes of Book: Briefing for a Descent Into
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  1. Doris Lessing _ Briefing for a Descent Into

    They have not yet evolved into an understanding of their individual selves as merely parts of a whole, first of all humanity, their own species, let alone achieving a conscious knowledge of humanity as part of Nature; plants, animals, birds, insects reptiles, and all these together making a small chord in the Cosmic Harmony
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  2. Doris Lessing _ Briefing for a Descent Into

    A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a million-fold the age of the Earth. But these same diviners, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilizations; they can't even begin to concede that civilizations might have very old histories. The Earth is allowed to be millions of millions of years old, but the birth of civilization is still set somewhere between two thousand B.C., depending on the bias of the archaeological school and the definition of civilization.
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  3. Doris Lessing _ Briefing for a Descent Into

    For suddenly it had changed into that gear when time is slower - as when, falling off a ladder, one has time to think: I shall land so, just there, and I must turn in the air slightly... All this in a space of time normally too short for any thought at all. But we are wrong in dividing the mind's machinery from time: they are the same. It is only in such sharp emphatic moments that we recognize this fact.
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  4. Doris Lessing _ Briefing for a Descent Into

    My sense of urgency is very simple,' said the professor, 'I've remembered that much. It's because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that's what anxiety is, in a lot of people. They know they have to do something, they should be doing something else, not just living hand-to-mouth, putting paint on their faces and decorating their caves and playing nasty tricks on their rivals. No. They have to do something else before they die-and so the mental hospitals are full and the chemists flourishing.
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  5. Doris Lessing _ Briefing for a Descent Into

    There are people in the world all the time who know" the professor said. "But they keep quiet. They just move about quietly, saving the people who know they are in the trap. And then, for the ones who have got out, it's like coming around from chloroform. They realize that all their lives they've been asleep and dreaming. And then it's their turn to learn the rules and the timing. And they become the ones to live quietly in the world, just as human beings might if there were only a few human beings on a planet that had monkeys on it for inhabitants...
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