Doris Lessingová citáty strana 2

„Vždycky mě udivuje, jak automaticky hledíme nejprve na to, co nás rozděluje a odlišuje. Nikdy se nedíváme na to, co mají lidé společného.“

Zdroj: [Pro spisovatelku Lessingovou znamená Nobelova cena "katastrofu", novinky.cz, 2008-05-13, 2013-05-23, http://www.novinky.cz/kultura/139670-pro-spisovatelku-lessingovou-znamena-nobelova-cena-katastrofu.html]

„Přílišné zjednodušení a hrůza z flexibility se vyskytují všude.“

„Není pochyb o tom, že fikce lépe vystihuje pravdu.“

„Ať už máš udělat cokoli, udělej to hned. Předpoklady jsou vždy nesplnitelné.“

„Ve starověku nebylo nic divného, když se senátor pohyboval kolem literatury.“

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.”

Doris Lessingová: Citáty anglicky

“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.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Four-Gated City

The Four-Gated City (1969)

“As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Zdroj: The Golden Notebook

“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.”

“Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Zdroj: The Golden Notebook

“Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.”

“In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Zdroj: The Golden Notebook

“For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.”

Doris Lessing kniha Martha Quest

Martha Quest (1952), Part III, ch. 2

“There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.”

Doris Lessing kniha A Proper Marriage

Zdroj: A Proper Marriage

“We are all creatures of the stars.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf
The Golden Notebook (1962)

“How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to…”

Zdroj: Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Zdroj: The Golden Notebook

“Laughter is by definition healthy.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Grass Is Singing

The Grass Is Singing, ch. 2 (1950)

“Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.”

The Summer Before the Dark (1973)

“Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.”

“Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

Zdroj: The Grass is Singing

“You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.”

“People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.”

“Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Zdroj: The Golden Notebook

“It is my belief… that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I. Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.”

“A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.”

“I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate”

“All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Zdroj: The Golden Notebook

“Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf, in "The Golden Notebook"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Kontext: 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.
Kontext: 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. <!-- p. 585

“For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Zdroj: The Golden Notebook

“Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Zdroj: The Golden Notebook

“Better Counsel comes overnight.”

Doris Lessing kniha The Golden Notebook

Zdroj: The Golden Notebook

“What matters most is that we learn from living.”

Besserer Rat kommt über Nacht. <br class="br">Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Emilia Galotti (1772), Act IV, scene III http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/7mlgl10.txt <br class="br">Misattributed

“It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.”

As quoted in Permission to Play : Taking Time to Renew Your Smile (2003) by Jill Murphy Long, p. 147

“The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation. It's heart-breaking how often I have to say when I'm giving talks, "This book is out of print. This book is out of print."”

Doris Lessing kniha The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983), p. 94, Flamingo edition