Frasi di Doris Lessing

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“Le piccole cose divertono le piccole menti.”

“Quello che le femministe vogliono da me è qualcosa che loro non hanno preso in considerazione perché proviene dalla religione. Vogliono che sia loro testimone. Quello che veramente vorrebbero dirmi è 'Sorella, starò al tuo fianco nella lotta per il giorno in cui quegli uomini bestiali non ci saranno più'. Veramente vogliono che si facciano affermazioni tanto semplificate sugli uomini e sulle donne? In effetti, lo vogliono davvero. Sono arrivata con grande rammarico a questa conclusione.”

“Felicità? È una parola che, di tanto in tanto, nella mia vita, ho raccolto, ho osservato – ma mai l'ho scoperta sotto le stesse sembianze.”

“Afflizione – sì, un atto di profondo dolore, ecco cos'è.”

“Sof'ja Tolstoja deve aver suddiviso i suoi ultimi anni tra quelli «prima di Čertkov» e quelli «dopo Čertkov». Abbiamo avuto numerose opportunità di studiare le azioni degli ideologi, ma Vladimir Čertkov fu un fenomeno piuttosto nuovo, e probabilmente l'incapacità di Sof'ja di tener testa a quest'uomo fu in parte dovuta alla difficoltà di classificarlo: era religioso? Certo, si dedicava al bene, come un fanatico a essere sinceri. Ma Čertkov voleva un'unica cosa: dominare Tolstoj, e in questo ebbe successo.”

“È dai falliti e dagli sconfitti di una civiltà che se ne possono meglio giudicare le debolezze.”

“La narrativa spaziale o scientifica è diventata un dialetto per la nostra epoca.”

“Fin dal primo versetto del Qohèlet si viene trasportati da una corrente ininterrotta di suoni, incantatoria, quasi ipnotica […]. Si hanno le orecchie in estasi e al tempo stesso si è totalmente vigili.”

“Se un pesce è la personificazione, l'essenza stessa del movimento dell'acqua, allora il gatto è diagramma e modello della leggerezza dell'aria.”

“Detesto il fatto che gli uomini debbano essere classificati in laburisti, conservatori, socialdemocratici o di sinistra. Le ideologie, come le fedi, hanno fatto e continuano a fare un'immensa quantità di male. Poi grazie a Dio tramontano e scompaiono.”

“Una donna che non ha un uomo non può incontrarne uno, qualsiasi uomo, di qualsiasi età, senza pensare, sia pure per mezzo secondo, forse questo è il mio uomo.”

“Nessuno di voi chiede qualcosa, ma tutto, e solo finché ne avete bisogno.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“We are all creatures of the stars.”

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

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

“Laughter is by definition healthy.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Better Counsel comes overnight.”

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

“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.”

“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."”