Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; born 22 October 1919) is a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In doing so the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest ever person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Read more about Doris Lessing: Awards, List of Works
Famous quotes by doris lessing:
“It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: without the sting of otherness, of—even—the vicious, without the terrible energies of the underside of health, sanity, sense, then nothing works or can work. I tell you that goodness-what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent—these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sides. Their hidden aspects contained and tempered.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“When old settlers say ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native.’ They are saying, in effect, ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don’t want you.’”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“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 (b. 1919)