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
fools greater law learning tolerate university
In the university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools
wiser-you wiser
As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.
capable english-writer love pretend quite terrible work
What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate, that you don't need love when you do or that you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
atmosphere badly both brought child children damaged exactly mentally war
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
hard life
I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.
absolutely british countries empire european people
When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.
thank-you prayer grateful
A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
children stupid understanding
It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.
truth stupid fighting
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
children capacity
Every child has the capacity to be everything.
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.
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.
cat air water
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.