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
two feminism machines
The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
women love-is literature
A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
cat owl paws
Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
months october unendurable
What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?
generations literature found
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
thinking suits sometimes
Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.
labels term critics
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
old-friends want wells
...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
southern empires young
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
people feminist world
What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
luck boulders bad-luck
Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
wise years etc
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
mets bores
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
capacity
What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.