Doris Lessing Doris May Lessing CH OBE is

Doris Lessing Doris May Lessing CH, OBE is a Zimbabwean-British writer, author of works such as the novels The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook. In 2007, Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was described by the Swedish Academy as "that epicist more. .

“ Doris Lessing: One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure. #Certainty

“ Doris Lessing: Man — who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance! #God

“ Doris Lessing: This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we -we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything. #Experts

“ Doris Lessing: None of you ask for anything — except everything, but just for so long as you need it. #Books - Reading

“ Doris Lessing: All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible. #Age and Aging

“ Doris Lessing: The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion. #Age and Aging

“ Doris Lessing: Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O. K. , then I won't have to write it. #Books - Reading

“ Doris Lessing: I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. . I knew I was moving into a new dimension, further from sanity than I had ever been. #Love

“ Doris Lessing: In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream. #Writers and Writing

“ Doris Lessing: There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a few days before, words like democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of understanding of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power. I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I. I. of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war; and I knew how strong these emotions were, in a way that would never leave me, would become part of how I saw the world. #Orgasm

“ Doris Lessing: My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped. As I have said, this was noticed #Poetry and Poets

“ Doris Lessing: We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind. #Education

“ Doris Lessing: The two women were alone in the London flat. "The point is, " said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, "the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up. " #Orgasm

“ Doris Lessing: What is a hero without love for mankind. #Heroes and Heroism

“ Doris Lessing: The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy. #Government

“ Doris Lessing: I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a worldmind, 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. #Class

“ Doris Lessing: It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves. #Death and Dying

“ Doris Lessing: Laughter is by definition healthy. #Laughter

“ Doris Lessing: The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it. #Class

“ Doris Lessing: That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. #Understanding

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