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Quotes from The Golden Notebook — Doris Lessing

1919–2013 England

← All quotes by Doris Lessing

18 quotes

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

None of you ask for anything — except everything, but just for so long as you need it.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

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

The Golden Notebook (1962)

From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the 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.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

Literature is analysis after the event.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?

The Golden Notebook (1962)

My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.
As I have said, this was not noticed.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:
"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

The two women were alone in the London flat.
"The point is," said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, "the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up."

The Golden Notebook (1962)

I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world-ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects, and creeds. But it was an attempt.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Doris Lessing (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.