Best Lessing Quotes & Sayings

I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing's Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed. — Susie Bright

But dogmatism - or the inclination "to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking" - is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing Lessing's January 9, 1771 letter to Mendelssohn.] — Leo Strauss

I'm not sure that finding a husband at university made me any less of a feminist or an academic. I still soaked up Susan Faludi; I still read Doris Lessing. But I did it at the same time I met someone who I felt was my soulmate. — Janine Di Giovanni

Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory. — Edmund White

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it. — Christopher Hitchens

I think it was Lessing who once said, 'There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose'. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour. — Viktor E. Frankl

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time. — Doris Lessing

BERNARD. (To DONALD.) Donald, read any new libraries lately?

DONALD. One or three. I did the complete works of Doris Lessing this week. I've been depressed.

[. . .]

BERNARD. Some people eat, some people drink, and some take dope.

DONALD. I read.

MICHAEL. And read and read and read. It's a wonder your eyes don't turn back in your head at the sight of a book jacket.

HANK. Well, at least he's a constructive escapist. — Mart Crowley

The new religion without any secrets is philosophy. The old religion, said Aristotle, is necessary only for the uneducated; Confucius, Buddha, Voltaire and Lessing were of the same opinion. — Artur Phleps

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes. — Doris Lessing

The first thing I learned from Judy Blume was that God is the wrong one to ask for bigger breasts. (Stephanie Lessing) — Jennifer O'Connell

Exactly. We know that the great Goethe carried a copy of Spinoza's Ethics in his pocket for a year. Imagine that - an entire year! And not only Goethe but many other great Germans. Lessing and Heine reported a clarity and calmness that came from reading this book. Who knows, there may come a time in your life when you, too, will need the calmness and clarity that Spinoza's Ethics offers. I shan't ask you to read that book now. You're too young to grasp its meaning. But I want you to promise that before your twenty-first birthday you will read it. Or perhaps I should say, read it by the time you're fully grown. Do I have your word as a good German? — Irvin D. Yalom

Ms. Lessing points to a current dogma: political correctness. "It's a continuation of the old Communist Party. It is! The same words, the same attitudes ... 'the Communist Party has made a decision and this is the line."
At first, she says, political correctness had a good beginning; she remembers saying that the language that we use is sexist, racist and so on. But then, "that became a dogma. Because we love a dogma,you know, we really do. We can never just let things develop easily from an idea, it seems to me there's always a group of fanatics who grasp it and make it a dogma. — Doris Lessing

Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O'Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux, — Bill Bryson

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse. — Amy Bloom

Writing is so much more problematic than drawing, full of moral pitfalls, ambiguity, public responsibility. If you record a day of your life, does the decision to do so change the shape of the day? One of Doris Lessing's days in The Golden Notebook is fifty-four pages long. It's complete; the rest are summaries - the "impression" of a day foisted artfully upon the reader by providing a few details. Fiction is made this way - as lineal perspective gives the illusion of three dimensions in drawing. But does the selection of a day - that you begin by knowing you must remember and observe - really affect it? Do you change the balance, distort the truth? The period itself, its choice and selection, does that not in itself constitute a kind of misconstruction, and the rest follow subconsciously? — Kate Millett