Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CHwas a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth22 October 1919
world ears antagonist
Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.
thinking looks world
I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.
bible kings wings
Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
hate years important
Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
war thinking people
The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
stupid believe devil
The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
thinking people groups
[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
running morning eye
Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting.
dream artist nightmare
Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares ...
reading thinking doing-nothing
Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing.
fiction realizing social
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.
way
For there is never any way to go but in.
stars mean may
We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.
passion spendthrift courtiers
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.