Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CHwas a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer 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...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth22 October 1919
children capacity
Every child has the capacity to be everything.
inspirational real sin
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
dog attitude real
Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.
real democracies-have people
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.
jobs book thinking
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.
design impossible recognition
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
inspirational success opportunity
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
inspirational truth terrible
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
drama taken eye
You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes.
learning memorable college
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
memories women
Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
education learning understanding
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
cat air water
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
mean thinking people
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.