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
gold matter doe
We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
country people unions
Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all - in one way or another - obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it.
country mean knowing
The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.
forgiveness forgiving ifs
if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.
education educational indoctrination
we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
art towns small-town
The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
dream information warning
Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.
fighting female needs
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work ...
strong war people
People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating ... an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.
children delight ability
Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
remember
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
mean self towns
Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
children spring interesting
But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
dream people age
After a certain age - and for some of us that can be very young - there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before ...