Doris Lessing Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“Every child has the capacity to be everything.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.”
-- Doris Lessing -
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“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.”
-- Doris LessingSource : Doris May Lessing (1981). “The Golden Notebook”, Bantam
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“Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.”
-- Doris LessingSource : "Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing". Book by Larry Chang, 2006.
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“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.”
-- Doris LessingSource : DORIS LESSING (1969). “THE FOUR-GATED CITY”
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“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.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.”
-- Doris Lessing -
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“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 -
“I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had--I don't know what--the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“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 vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
-- Doris Lessing -
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“If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend, the cat who purrs as you stroke, or rub his chin, or scratch his head.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.”
-- Doris Lessing -
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“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.”
-- Doris LessingSource : Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers
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“It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.”
-- Doris Lessing -
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“What matters most is that we learn from living.”
-- Doris LessingSource : "Permission to Play: Taking Time to Renew Your Smile". Book by Jill Murphy Long, 2003.
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“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 -
“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.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.”
-- Doris Lessing -
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“At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.”
-- Doris Lessing -
“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.”
-- Doris Lessing
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