Frases de Doris Lessing

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“Es terrible destruir la imagen que una persona tiene de sí misma en aras de la verdad o cualquier otra abstracción. ¿Cómo saber si será capaz de crear otra que le permita seguir viviendo?”

“Una vez me pasé un año entero sin escribir, a propósito, para ver qué sucedía. Tuve muchos problemas. Creo que no me sienta bien no escribir: me pongo de muy mal humor. La escritura te da una especie de equilibrio.”

“Toda mi generación tiene madres frustradas y amargadas. Y todas estuvimos intentando escaparnos de lo que ellas eran.”

“Para escribir, para crear literatura, debe existir una estrecha relación con las bibliotecas, con los libros, con la Tradición.”

“La clase trabajadora acomodada vivía una buena vida en los tiempos victorianos, con escapadas a las carreras, todo tipo de fiestas y celebraciones. Comían y bebían con muy buen apetito. No había lugar para el tedio o la frialdad en Flower Terrance y sus calles adyacentes, llenas de familiares y amigos.”

“He sido una niña terriblemente dañada, terriblemente neurótica, con una sensibilidad y una capacidad de sufrimiento exageradas.”

“Es imprescindible alguna clase de educación.”

“El director ha malversado los fondos escolares y se encuentra suspendido, situación que suscita la pregunta habitual para todos nosotros aunque por lo general en contextos más prósperos: ¿Cómo puede ser que estas personas se comporten de tal manera cuando deben saber que todos las están observando?”

“Cada libro tiene su propia vida. Por lo general, todos los libros tienen que luchar al principio contra la negatividad y la indiferencia.”

“A veces he querido escribir un libro concreto y no he sabido cómo hacerlo, cómo resolverlo, y me he pasado 10 años hasta encontrar el modo. Pero mientras tanto hacía otros libros.”

“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."”