Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
Doris Lessing
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Books
Disappeared
People
Literature
Respected
Society
Ordinary
Doesn
Realize
Respect
Past
Serious
Book
Learning
Whole
Realizing
Much
More quotes by Doris Lessing
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing
Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
Doris Lessing
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
Doris Lessing
None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
Doris Lessing
At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
Doris Lessing
This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
Doris Lessing
September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
Doris Lessing
What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
Doris Lessing
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
Doris Lessing
What is a hero without love for mankind.
Doris Lessing
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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.
Doris Lessing
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing
Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing
You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
Doris Lessing
There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.
Doris Lessing
It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
Doris Lessing
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
Better Counsel comes overnight.
Doris Lessing