Top 100 Quotes About Lessing
#1. Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.
Edmund White
#2. What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
Doris Lessing
#3. I'm not sure that finding a husband at university made me any less of a feminist or an academic. I still soaked up Susan Faludi; I still read Doris Lessing. But I did it at the same time I met someone who I felt was my soulmate.
Janine Di Giovanni
#4. Doris Lessing really doesn't care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn't want that in her head. She's going where she's going, and that's where she wants to go.
Salman Rushdie
#5. But dogmatism - or the inclination "to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking" - is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing Lessing's January 9, 1771 letter to Mendelssohn.]
Leo Strauss
#6. I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing's Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.
Susie Bright
#7. The new religion without any secrets is philosophy. The old religion, said Aristotle, is necessary only for the uneducated; Confucius, Buddha, Voltaire and Lessing were of the same opinion.
Artur Phleps
#8. The first thing I learned from Judy Blume was that God is the wrong one to ask for bigger breasts. (Stephanie Lessing)
Jennifer O'Connell
#9. I think it was Lessing who once said, 'There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose'. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.
Viktor E. Frankl
#10. I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does; Doris Lessing does.
Lorrie Moore
#11. THE HONEYEATER story was mesmerizing: the story took hold of me and I felt compelled to write it. I was also inspired by a few female authors (among them, Doris Lessing and Isabel Allende) I've admired over the years
women who preceded me and who gave me the courage to even begin.
Yolanda A. Reid
#12. Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O'Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux,
Bill Bryson
#13. I wonder sometimes whether a person has to become insane these days in order to feel certain things. Lessing once said, Who doesn't become insane over certain things, has no sanity to lose,
Erich Fromm
#14. I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
Amy Bloom
#15. Did the Almighty, holding in his right hand truth, and in his left hand search after truth, deign to proffer me the one I might prefer, in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request search after truth.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
#16. My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
Doris Lessing
#17. You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
Doris Lessing
#18. Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
Doris Lessing
#20. All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
Doris Lessing
#21. She could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.
Doris Lessing
#22. We have no children Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children. You have one child.
Doris Lessing
#23. The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
Doris Lessing
#24. Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.
Doris Lessing
#25. Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
Doris Lessing
#26. Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
#27. It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
#28. We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
Doris Lessing
#29. My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.
Doris Lessing
#30. Then he said, 'Well, Matty, we don't seem to go together at all, do we. I'm simply not broadminded enough for your Jews and your niggers.
Doris Lessing
#33. The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau - but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.
Doris Lessing
#34. We are being punished, that's all." "What for?" he demanded, already on guard because there was a tone in her voice he hated. "For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would be.
Doris Lessing
#35. Thus even the most wretched individual breaths like a leaf in a verdant forest. His national identity supported him. A revered history receives him. A legitimate culture accepts his voice into the choir of a great community.
Theodor Lessing
#36. Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
Doris Lessing
#38. Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?" "Yes," Ted had said. "Then I can't help you," Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy
Doris Lessing
#40. Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same
to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
Doris Lessing
#41. It is open to every man to choose the direction of his striving," he explained, "and every man may take comfort from the fine saying that the search for truth is more precious than its possession."70
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
#43. Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
Doris Lessing
#44. Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
Doris Lessing
#45. For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over.
Doris Lessing
#47. It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.
Doris Lessing
#48. I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
Doris Lessing
#49. I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.
Doris Lessing
#51. Her look at him was now as aggressive as his had been. 'It's all very well for you, you're a man,' she said bitterly, and entirely without coquetry; but he said flippantly, even suggestively, 'It will be all quite well for you too!
Doris Lessing
#52. I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
Doris Lessing
#53. Mother's room, and mother's need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights.
Doris Lessing
#55. Martha Quest, who thought of herself as so adventurous, so free and unbounded - the fact was, even the idea of picking up a telephone and making herself known to a new person troubled her: she made excuses, she could not do it.
Doris Lessing
#58. When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
Doris Lessing
#59. Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
#60. You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.
Doris Lessing
#61. The human community is evolving ... We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.
Doris Lessing
#62. When she returned to the office, she found that Mr Jasper Cohen had gone abruptly on holiday. His son had been killed in Spain - he had been shot, near Madrid, rather more than a year before; a friend of his had written, on returning safe to England, to tell his father so.
Doris Lessing
#63. It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I've seen it over and over again. If
Doris Lessing
#64. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
Doris Lessing
#65. When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.
Doris Lessing
#66. She put that book down and picked up Ellis. Now, it is hardly possible to be bored by a book on sex when one is fifteen, but she was restless because this collection of interesting facts seemed to have so little to do with her own problems.
Doris Lessing
#67. Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work ...
Doris Lessing
#68. I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
Doris Lessing
#69. I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.
Doris Lessing
#70. All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
Doris Lessing
#71. We need a shape for the tale. A beginning, a middle and an end.
Doris Lessing
#72. What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
Doris Lessing
#73. You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing
#74. Who cannot resolve upon a moment's notice To live his own life, he forever lives A slave to others.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
#75. Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
Doris Lessing
#76. Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
Doris Lessing
#77. I have ideas that I will probably never write now.
Doris Lessing
#79. If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing
#80. The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
Doris Lessing
#81. Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And
Doris Lessing
#83. What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
Doris Lessing
#84. For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother.
Doris Lessing
#85. Or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Doris Lessing
#86. The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
Doris Lessing
#87. Yes, my child, you must read. You must read everything that comes your way. It doesn't matter what you read at first, later you'll learn discrimination. Schools are no good, Matty, you learn nothing at school. If you want to be anything, you must educate yourself.
Doris Lessing
#88. [On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable?
Doris Lessing
#89. She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
Doris Lessing
#90. What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
Doris Lessing
#91. The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
#92. Choose? When do I ever choose? Have I ever chosen?
Doris Lessing
#94. [I wrote] '...letters designed to hide behind.
Doris Lessing
#95. You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.
Doris Lessing
#96. For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.
Doris Lessing
#97. If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let's make a foursome!
Doris Lessing
#98. I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.
Doris Lessing
#99. We moderns do not believe in demigods, but our smallest hero we expect to feel and act as a demigod.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
#100. Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing
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