British author (1919-2013)
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul
When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?
DORIS LESSING
"Doris Lessing Reflects on World, Change", The Washington Post, October 7, 2006
You know, it never occurred to me until afterwards that everybody in these books is a refugee. But everyone is running from drought or flood or civil war. I do think a lot about them. You know, not far from here is a road where refugees of all kinds line the roads, and people go there to pick up a plumber or carpenter or something. This isn't an official thing, you know, but there they are. A friend of mine goes there when she wants anything. They are all very skilled people.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The San Francisco Chronicle, January 15, 2006
I woke up one morning, and I couldn't move my arm. It was the oddest thing, the paralysis. I called up a friend and said, "I think I've had a stroke," and, in fact, that's what my doctor told me. It wasn't terrible, but it was enough to scare me. Now I think about death all the time. I have my death arm, my right arm.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The Progressive, June 1999
Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
Men are unwise and curiously planned.
DORIS LESSING
The Cleft: A Novel
Every child has the capacity to be everything.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world-ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects, and creeds. But it was an attempt.
DORIS LESSING
introduction, The Golden Notebook
If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Curse not the king, no not in thy thought;
and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber,
for a bird of the air shall carry the voice,
and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
DORIS LESSING
Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher
What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
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 LESSING
The Golden Notebook
You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.
DORIS LESSING
The Summer Before the Dark
It was all nonsense to see things in terms of peaks and crises: the personal events, like the public ones, were long-term affairs, after all. They built up.... It is after--at least months, but it is usually years--that a person will say, My God, my whole life has changed, talking about a passion of love or hate, a marriage, a testing job of work. My life has changed because I have changed.
DORIS LESSING
The Summer Before the Dark
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
I don't share the widely held admiration for the 1960s. I was in London, "Swinging London," as it was called, and I saw a lot of suicides and a lot of people who ended up in loony bins. There were a great many casualties. The 1960s was a dangerous decade -- though, of course, the politics of that time was very attractive. Nothing is more attractive than people playing at being revolutionaries. The people who were involved in Paris, 1968, and all that, I find very attractive. Of course, I was too old to really enjoy the 1960s. By the time 1968 rolled around, I was almost fifty. I should have been in my twenties.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The Progressive, June 1999
Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook