Doris Lessing
British-Zimbabwean · 1919–2013
British-Zimbabwean novelist and Nobel laureate whose restless intelligence ranged from realist explorations of women's inner lives and political disillusionment to speculative fiction. Her work dissects the prisons of ideology, gender, and the self with unsparing honesty.
Wikipedia ↗“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
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“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 human being into solitary confinement can make a madman of him or an animal.”
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“What is terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.”
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“It is the mark of great people that they hand the world on a little better than they found it. And the mark of the mediocre is to keep things as they are.”
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“With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions, because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how.”
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“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.”
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“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.”
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