Doris May Lessing was a poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer and biographer from Great Britain, who went on to become one of the greatest authors in the world and won plenty of accolades across a career spanning several decades. She was born in Iran and also lived in erstwhile Rhodesia and South Africa. Lessing started writing stories when she was still a child and got them published in magazines in South Africa. ‘The Grass is Singing’, Lessing’s first novel, was published in 1950 however it was with her novel ‘The Golden Notebook’, published 12 years later that she became a global sensation and subsequently went on to become one of the world’s foremost authors. Some of her best known works include ‘Children of Violence’, ‘The Good Terrorist’, ‘The Fifth Child’, ‘The Sweetest Dream’, ‘Memories of a Survivor’ and the 5 novel collection titled ‘Canopus in Argos’, among many other works, including short story collections and biographies. Lessing’s lifelong dedication to the craft of writing brought her plenty of accolades and awards from different parts of the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007. Lessing’s work and life also provided a veritable feast of profound quotes that would be quoted for years to come. Here are the best ones.
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
Doris Lessing
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.
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.
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
Doris Lessing
There is only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best
Doris Lessing
How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to...
Doris Lessing
Laughter is by definition healthy.
Doris Lessing
We are all creatures of the stars.
Doris Lessing
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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.
Doris Lessing
People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
Doris Lessing
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.
A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
Doris Lessing
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.
Doris Lessing
I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
Doris Lessing
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.
Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.
Doris Lessing
We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
Doris Lessing
I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?
Doris Lessing
...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.
This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
Doris Lessing
Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of suble air.
Doris Lessing
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.
Doris Lessing
Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
Doris Lessing
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook?
Sometimes it ought to be.
Sometimes it is.
If someone cracks up, what does that mean? At what point does a person about to fall to pieces say: I'm cracking up? And if I were to crack up, what form would it take?
Her source of self respect was that she had not - as she put it - given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage.
Doris Lessing
So very Russian," people around were murmuring. That they did meant this was an audience pretty low down on the scale of sophistication, otherwise they would be saying, "Just like us, isn't it?
As always he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul.
Doris Lessing
Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
Doris Lessing
Žena bez muškarca ne može se upoznati s muškarcem, s bilo kojim muškarcem , bilo koje dobi, a da ne pomisli, makar to bilo i na pola sekunde: Možda je ovo pravi muškarac.
Yes, it’s because it’s one thing to think poor things and another to allow that African politics could have any resemblance at all to English politics—even such a long time ago.
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.
It is not too much to say that when the word "blood" is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart.
Doris Lessing
Ich glaube, dass Literatur – ein Roman, eine Erzählung, sogar eine Zeile aus einem Gedicht – die Macht hat, Reiche zu zerstören.
(Schritte im Schatten)
Doris Lessing
A writer is the conscience of the world.
Doris Lessing
This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - "nostalgia" is their word for it - which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined.
He leaves and she thinks for the hundredth time that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.
The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane.
Doris Lessing
[I wrote] '...letters designed to hide behind.
Doris Lessing
Is it being said too often how much we in the West have suffered because of the long wars between Islam and Christianity, leaving us biased and with gaps in our information? I think not.
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