Works
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
The Grass Is Singing
Doris Lessing
The Four-Gated City
Doris Lessing
Martha Quest
Doris LessingParticularly Cats
Doris Lessing
The Good Terrorist
Doris Lessing
A Proper Marriage
Doris LessingThe Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
Doris LessingFamous Doris Lessing Quotes
“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
Source: Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
“There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.”
Salon interview (1997)
Context: All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Salon interview (1997)
Context: 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. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.
Salon interview (1997)
Context: All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Doris Lessing Quotes about people
Source: The Golden Notebook
As quoted in An Uncommon Scold (1989) by Abby Adams, p. 18
Paul Tanner, in "Free Women: 1"<!-- p. 173 -->
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
Doris Lessing Quotes about the trip
Salon interview (1997)
Context: 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. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.
Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 4"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Introduction (1971 edition)
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: 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.
As I have said, this was not noticed
quoted in "A Talk With Doris Lessing; Lessing Author's Query" (30 March 1980), Minda Bikman, New York Times Book Review
Doris Lessing: Trending quotes
“Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
Introduction (1971)
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. 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 vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: 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.
Saul Green in "The Golden Notebook"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Doris Lessing Quotes
Introduction (1971)
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:
"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
First lines, "Free Women: 1"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 2"<!-- 255 -->
Source: The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing — I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the 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.
“Trust no friend without faults, and love a maiden, but no angel.”
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, as quoted in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood, p. 499
Misattributed
“Oh Christ. I couldn't care less. … I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise.”
As quoted in "Doris Lessing oldest to win literature Nobel" by Philip Marchand in The Toronto Star (12 October 2007) http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/Books/article/266062
Context: Oh Christ. I couldn't care less. … I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off.
“With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates.”
Index on Censorship (March/April 1999)
Context: 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.
“You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.”
Interview with Herbert Mitgang, "Mrs. Lessing Addresses Some of Life's Puzzles," The New York Times (22 April 1984)
Context: You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
“In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better.”
Interview with Herbert Mitgang, "Mrs. Lessing Addresses Some of Life's Puzzles," The New York Times, (22 April 1984) http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/10/specials/lessing-puzzles.html
Context: In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
“It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.”
Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"<!-- p. 59 -->
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: 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.
“You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?”
Anna Wulf, in "The Golden Notebook"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Salon interview (1997)
Context: 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. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism. Anyway, that's my thesis. It's very oversimplified, as you can see.
“The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness.”
Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"<!-- p. 59 -->
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: 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.
Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 4" <!-- p. 454 -->
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.
“Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line.”
The Sunday Times, London (10 May 1992)
Context: Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.
“What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous.”
Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing. <!-- 128
Introduction (1971)
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:
"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing. <!-- 128
“Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.”
Source: The Golden Notebook
“In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.”
Martha Quest (1952), Part III, ch. 2
Anna Wulf
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Source: The Golden Notebook
The Grass Is Singing, ch. 2 (1950)
Anna Wulf, in "The Golden Notebook"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh.
Context: I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. … I knew I was moving into a new dimension, further from sanity than I had ever been. <!-- p. 585
Source: The Golden Notebook
“Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.”
Source: The Golden Notebook
“Better Counsel comes overnight.”
Besserer Rat kommt über Nacht.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Emilia Galotti (1772), Act IV, scene III http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/7mlgl10.txt
Misattributed
“What matters most is that we learn from living.”
As quoted in Permission to Play : Taking Time to Renew Your Smile (2003) by Jill Murphy Long, p. 147
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983), p. 94, Flamingo edition
It's a roll call of dead books.
Salon interview (1997)
“What is a hero without love for mankind?”
Was ist ein Held ohne Menschenliebe!
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Philotas (1759), Act 1, Scene 7 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8phts10.txt
Misattributed
In interview, quoted in part 1 of Useful Idiots - BBC World Service (7 July 2010) https://web.archive.org/web/20101008193804/http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2010/07/100624_doc_useful_idiots_lenin.shtml part 1 on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/useful-idiots/id438700488?i=1000094122641&mt=2
Particularly Cats, ch. 2 (1967)
Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Käthe Kollwitz, diary entry (1 January 1912)
Misattributed
“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”
As quoted in Writers on Writing (1986) by Jon Winokur
