Quotes of the Week - March 9, 2010:
"Young players, young boys, rich boys - this is the problem."
-- Fabio Capello the England soccer football manager, says money is
spoiling the game.
"I want you to know, Mrs Obama, that I'm your husband's No 1 fan.
And not just because he's a black man. He's mixed. And I wouldn't really
know what that looks like anyway." --Stevie Wonder greets Michelle
Obama, wife of US president.
"I've only been with two men my entire life. I've never even come
close to having a one-night stand." -- Actress Megan Fox says she
is no man-eater.
Authors:
The Grass is Singing Quotes, The Grass is Singing Important Quotes,
Quotations, Sayings from the novel by Doris Lessing
People all over the country ... felt a little spurt of anger
mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief
had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could
only have been expected. When natives steal, murder or rape,
that is the feeling white people have. The Grass is Singing Reaction to newspaper paragraph about murder
of farmer's wife and arrest of houseboy, Chapter 1.
... [in the old society] everyone knew what they could or
could not do. If someone did an unforgiveable thing, like touching
one of the King's women, he would submit fatalistically to punishment,
which was likely to be impalement over an ant heap on a stake,
or something equally unpleasant. 'I have done wrong, and I know
it,' he might say, 'therefore let me be punished.' The Grass is Singing Chapter 1.
When he came to think about it, the murder was logical enough;
looking back over the last few days he could see that something
like this was bound to happen, he could almost say he had been
expecting it, some kind of violence or ugliness. Anger, violence,
death, seemed natural to this vast, harsh country .... The Grass is Singing Marston, Chapter 1.
If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her
own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one
day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women
who have become old without ever having been middle-aged: a
little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally
kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs. The Grass is Singing Mary, Chapter 2.
She felt sentimental at weddings, but she had a profound distaste
for sex; there had been little privacy in her home and there
were things she did not care to remember; she had taken good
care to forget them years ago. The Grass is Singing Mary, Chapter 2.
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in
the interests of truth or some other abstraction. The Grass is Singing Chapter 2.
...she began to feel, slowly, that it was not in this [Dick's]
house she was sitting, with her husband, but back with her mother,
watching her endlessly contrive and patch and mend - till suddenly
she got to her feet with an awkward scrambling movement, unable
to bear it; possessed with the thought that her father, from
his grave, had sent out his will and forced her back into the
kind of life he had made her mother lead. The Grass is Singing Mary, Chapter 3.
Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual
relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way
that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without
having anything tangible to complain of. Mary did not have to
learn this, because it was natural to her, and because she had
expected nothing in the first place - at any rate, not from
this man, who was flesh and blood, and therefore rather ridiculous
- not the creature of her imagination whom she endowed with
hands and lips abut left bodiless. The Grass is Singing Chapter 3.
[Mary] fell asleep holding his hand protectively, as she might
have held a child's whom she had wounded. The Grass is Singing Chapter 3.
She was afraid of them [the natives], of course. Every woman
in South Africa is brought up to be. In her childhood she had
been forbidden to walk out alone, and whe she asked why, she
had been told in the furtive, lowered, but matter-of-fact voice
she associated with her mother, that they were nasty and might
do horrible things to her. The Grass is Singing Mary, Chapter 4.
He knew how to get on with natives; dealing with them was
a sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying game in which both sides
followed certain unwritten rules. The Grass is Singing Dick, Chapter 5.
His craving for forgiveness, and his abasement before her
was the greatest satisfaction she knew, although she despised
him for it. The Grass is Singing Dick and Mary, Chapter 5.
Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company.
But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping
of the spirit for lack of companionship. The Grass is Singing Mary, Chapter 5.
Children were what he wanted now that his marriage was a failure
and seemed impossible to right. Children would bring them close
together and break down this invisible barrier. The Grass is Singing Dick and Mary, Chapter 5.
Mary was stuck by that whistle: it was so familiar. It was
a trick of his [Dick's]; he stuck his hands in his pockets,
little boy fashion, and whistled with a pathetic jauntiness
when she lost her temper and raged at him because of the house,
or because of the clumsiness of the water arrangements. It always
made her feel quite mad with irritation, because he could not
stand up to her and hold his own. The Grass is Singing Chapter 6.
Dick often stood at the edge of the field, watching the wind
flow whitely over the tops of the shining young trees, that
bent and swung and shook themselves all day. He had planted
them apparently on an impulse; but it was really the fruition
of a dream of his. Years before he bought the farm, some mining
company had cut out every tree on the place ... it wasn't much,
planting a hundred acres of good trees that would grow into
straight, white stemmed giants; but it was a small retribution;
and this was his favorite place on the farm. When he was particularly
worried, or had quarreled with Mary, or wanted to think clearly,
he stood and looked at his trees ... The Grass is Singing Chapter 6.
Mary, with the memory of her own mother recurring more and
more frequently, like an older, sardonic double of herself walking
beside her, followed the course her upbringing made inevitable.
To rage at Dick seemed to her a failure in pride; her formerly
pleasant but formless face was setting into lines of endurance
.... The Grass is Singing Chapter 6.
She [Mary] could not explain to Dick how that store smell
made her remember the way she had stood, a a very small girl,
looking fearfully up at the rows of bottles on the shelves,
wondering which of them her father would handle that night;
the way her mother had taken coins out of his pockets ... and
how the next day she would be sent up to the store to buy food
that would not appear on the account at the month's end. The Grass is Singing Chapter 6.
They were moving gently toward a new relation; they were more
truly together than they had ever been. But then it was that
he became ill; and the new tenderness between them, which might
have grown into something that saved them both, was not yet
strong enough to survive this fresh trouble. The Grass is Singing Mary and Dick, Chapter 7.
The phrases of this little lecture came naturally to her lips:
she did not have to look for them in her mind. She had heard
them so often from her father, when he was lecturing his native
servants, that they welled up from the part of her brain that
held her earliest memories. The Grass is Singing Mary, Chapter 7.
She hated it when they spoke to each other in dialects she
did not understand ... she hated their half-naked, thick-muscled
black bodies stooping in the mindless rhythm of their work.
She hated their sullenness, their averted eyes when they spoke
to her, their veiled insolence; and she hated more than anything,
with a violent physical repulsion, the heavy smell that came
from the, a hot, sour animal smell. The Grass is Singing Mary and the natives, Chapter 7.
She needed to think of Dick, the man to whom she was irrevocably
married, as a person on his own account, a success from his
own efforts. When she saw him weak and goal-less, and pitiful,
she hated him, and the hate turned in on herself. She needed
a man stronger than herself, and she was trying to create one
out of Dick. The Grass is Singing Mary, Chapter 8.
It was like a nightmare where one is powerless against horror:
the touch of this black man's hand on her shoulder filled her
with nausea; she had never, not once in her whole life, touched
the flesh of a native. As they approached the bed, the soft
touch still on her shoulder, she felt her head beginning to
swim and her bones going soft. The Grass is Singing Mary and the native boy Moses, Chapter
9.
She [Mary] felt as if she were in a dark tunnel, nearing something
final, something she could not visualize, but which waited for
her inexorably, inescapably. And in the attitude of Moses, in
the way he moved or spoke, with that easy, confident, bullying
insolence, she could see he was waiting too. The Grass is Singing Chapter 9.
He [Charlie] had been shocked out of self-interest. It was
not even pity for Dick that moved him. He was obeying the dictate
of the first law of white South Africa, which is: 'Thou shalt
not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point;
because if you do, the nigger will see he is as good as you
are.' The Grass is Singing Chapter 10.
He [Tony] had read enough about psychology to understand the
sexual aspect of the color bar, one of whose foundations is
the jealousy of the white man for the superior sexual potency
of the native; and he was surprised at one of the guarded, a
white woman, so easily evading this barrier. Yet he had met
a doctor on the boat coming out, with years of experience in
a country district, who had told him he would be surprised to
know the number of white woman who had relations with black
men. Tony felt at the time that he would be surprised; he felt
it would be rather like having a relationship with an animal,
in spite of his 'progressiveness'. The Grass is Singing Chapter 10.
Though what thoughts of regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded
human affection were compounded with the satisfaction of [Moses']
completed revenge, it is impossible to say. For, when he had
gone perhaps a couple of hundred yards through the soaking bush
he stopped, turned aside, and leaned against a tree on an ant-heap
And there he would remain, until his pursuers, in their turn,
came to find him. The Grass is Singing Chapter 11.
The Grass Is Singing is the first
novel, published in 1950, by Persian-born British author Doris Lessing.
It takes place in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in southern Africa, during
the late 1940s and deals with racial politics between whites and blacks
in that country, then a British Colony. Lessing was born on October
22, 1919, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.
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