Doris Lessing Quotes

• To be in love with a country or a political regime is a tricky business. You get your heart broken even more surely than by being in love with a person.

  Doris Lessing

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• It does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, ‘Without me the literary industry would not exist’.

  Doris Lessing

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• Briefing for a Descent into Hell.

  Doris Lessing

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• But this novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.

  Doris Lessing

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• It occurred to her that she was going mad… Yet it did not seem to her that she was even slightly mad; but rather that people who were not as obsessed as she was with the inchoate world mirrored in the newspapers were all out of touch with an awful necessity.

  Doris Lessing

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• Martha and Jasmine smiled at each other…the future they dreamed of seemed just around the corner; they could almost touch it. Each saw an ideal town, clean, noble and beautiful, soaring up over the actual town they saw, which consisted in this area of sordid little shops and third-rate cafes.

  Doris Lessing

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• In every city there is a group of middle-aged and elderly women who in fact run it. The extent to which they are formally organised is no gauge of their real power. The way in which they respond to danger is that gauge; and from the frankness with which they express their intentions can be measured the extent of the danger.

  Doris Lessing

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• For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.

  Doris Lessing

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• I had learned that if one cannot call a country to heel like a dog, neither can one dismiss the past with a smile in an easy gush of feeling, saying: I could not help it, I am also a victim.

  Doris Lessing

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• When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

  Doris Lessing

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• When old settlers say ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native.’ They are saying, in effect, ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don’t want you.’

  Doris Lessing

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• 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.

  Doris Lessing

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  Tags in Reading

• What’s terrible is to pretend that second-rate is 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.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Inspirational

• 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

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  Tags in Writing

• There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Truth
• 

  You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

  Doris Lessing

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  Tags in Writer, Learn

• Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

  Doris Lessing

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• When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

  Doris Lessing

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• When you’re young you think that you’re going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

  Doris Lessing

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• 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

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Doris Lessing (110)

Birth:	22nd October, 1919
Death:	17th November, 2013
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Writer

About

Doris May Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia. She was a British novelist, poet, playwright, 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. Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. Her final book, Alfred and Emily, appeared in 2008.

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Births

• 1952 - Mel Smith
• 1987 - Alicia Sacramone
• 1766 - Robert Bloomfield
• 1955 - Michael Musto
• 1795 - Rowland Hill

Deaths

• 1919 - Pierre Auguste Renoir
• 1962 - Mary Gilmore
• 1981 - Walter Knott
• 1894 - Robert Louis Stevenson
• 1910 - Mary Baker Eddy