Doris May Lessing (22nd October 1919 – 17th November 2013) was a British novelist poet, playwright, and short story writer, best known for her novels including The Grass is Singing (US – UK), and The Golden Notebook (US – UK).
An early feminist, Lessing was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, described by the Swedish Academy as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. When met on the street by journalists and told she had won the prize, she responded “Oh, Christ!”.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Lifetime achievement in British Literature Prize and in 2008 The Times ranked her fifth on a list of The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945.
Lessing lived a full life, full of wisdom and today we’re sharing some of our favourite quotations from the author with you:
“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
“For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.”
“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.”
“I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.”
“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.”
“What’s terrible is to pretend that 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.”
“As you get older, you don’t get wiser. You get irritable.”
“For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being.”
“Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.”
“Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”
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