Doris Lessing citations

Page 2

“Écrire sur soi-même c'est écrire sur les autres, puisque vos problèmes, vos souffrances, vos plaisirs, vos émotions -et vos idées extraordinaires et remarquables- ne peuvent pas n'appartenir qu'à vous. La façon de régler le problème de la "subjectivité", cette affreuse tendance à se préoccuper de l'infime individu qui se trouve en même temps pris dans une explosion de possibilités terribles et merveilleuses, consiste à voir en lui un microcosme et ainsi à dépasser le personnel général, comme le fait évidemment la vie, transformant une expérience intime -du moins le croyez-vous- lorsque vous êtes encore enfant, "je suis amoureuse", "j'éprouve telle ou telle émotion, je pense telle ou telle chose" -en quelque chose de plus ample: grandir consiste en fin de compte à comprendre que sa propre expérience incroyable et unique est ce que tout le monde partage.”

“Bras croisés, une femme attendait sur le seuil de sa porte de service. Réfléchissait-elle? Non, elle n’aurait pas dit cela. Elle s’efforçait de saisir quelque chose, ou de le dénuder pour pouvoir l’observer et le définir; depuis déjà quelque temps, elle « essayait » des idées comme on essaye des robes alignées dans une penderie.”

“Je me rappelle la sensation de la délicate pression de sa main au creux de mes reins, et je
me rappelle avoir songé que, vivant en groupe comme nous le faisions, ces brusques attirances pouvaient surgir et s'estomper en un instant, laissant derrière elles une tendresse, une curiosité insatisfaites, et un sentiment de perte légèrement douloureux, mais pas déplaisant ; et je pensai que c'était peut-être toute cette peine tendre des possibilités irréalisées qui nous liait.”

“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”

“As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.”

“I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.”

“Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.”

“Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.”

“In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.”

“For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.”

“There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.”

“We are all creatures of the stars.”

“How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to…”

“It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”

“Laughter is by definition healthy.”

“Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.”

“People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.”

“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.”

“It is my belief… that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I. Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.”

“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.”

“I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate”

“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.”

“Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.”

“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.”

“Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.”

“Better Counsel comes overnight.”

“What matters most is that we learn from living.”

“It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.”

“The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation. It's heart-breaking how often I have to say when I'm giving talks, "This book is out of print. This book is out of print."”