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Meaning
This points to a warning against turning a political struggle into a neat story. The quote can be read as saying that admiration from a distance can flatten the messier realities of organizing, disagreement, and hard tradeoffs. It lands when a movement is spoken about in glowing terms, while the daily work and internal tensions get left out.
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Originally said in English.
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About Doris Lessing
British novelist
Doris Lessing was a British novelist, born in Iran and later associated with Southern Rhodesia and England. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 and is known for fiction shaped by displacement, political questionings, and changing personal and social worlds. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing, the five-volume Children of Violence sequence, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and the five books of Canopus in Argos: Archives. Her work often engages with society, ideology, and the pressures placed on individual lives.
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Books by Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook
1962
Alfred and Emily
2008
Ben, in the World
2000
Mara and Dann
1999
The Summer Before the Dark
1973