Essayists From England

"Perish the lover, whose imperfect flame Forgets one feature of the nymph he lov'd."

"For seldom shall she hear a tale So sad, so tender, yet so true."

"She pleas'd while distant, but, when near, she charm'd."

"Her cap, far whiter than the driven snow, Emblem right meet of decency does yield."

"Pun-provoking thyme."

"A little bench of heedless bishops here, And there a chancellor in embryo."

"Oft has good-nature been the fool's defence, And honest meaning gilded want of sense."

"Love is a pleasing, but a various clime!"

"Every good poet includes a critic; the reverse will not hold."

"I trimm'd my lamp, consumed the midnight oil."

"Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention."

"I also can’t get along with Turgenev, though I love Russians, or Doris Lessing, though I am a feminist."

"Doris Lessing was nothing less than the goddess of literature herself for young women like myself aspiring to write in the 1970s. Her classic, The Golden Notebook, directly addressed the contradictions in women's lives in a way that was sophisticated, insightful and dispassionate.... When I started writing novels in the early 1980s, I often felt pressure from women to depict wholesome female role models. The pressure never worked, partly because Doris Lessing had gone before and blazed a path for all of us as readers, as women, as people."

"Mrs. Lessing's view of recent politics is not everyone's. Her view of the future (inevitably brutish and painful) is that it is the present: that we are all hypnotized, awaiting cataclysms which we are in fact living through now; that we are now — as we run and read — in the process of a rapid evolution; that we are mutating fast but can't see it, the chief characteristic of our race being its inability to see what is under its nose; that historians and scientists, in their timid traditionalism, feed our fantasy view of ourselves — suppressing truths about the human condition, about madness, about sanity, about the essential nature of the mind."

"When was reviewing Doris Lessing's last two books from the Shikasta series, I found that she has discovered what I, to my great joy, had discovered a little earlier: that (a) if you're writing what they call science fiction, you're absolutely free-you can write anything you damn please, and (b) that if you take seriously the science fiction premise, you are furnished with an inexhaustable supply of absolutely beautiful and complex metaphors for our present situation, for who and where we are now, and I think it's not only women who have found this out. Angus Wilson was one of the first to do this with The Old Man in the Zoo years ago. That is a science fiction novel, if you look at it closely. Several of the writers who interest me most are doing this sort of thing, but Lessing has done it wholeheartedly and courageously. I love her introduction that says academics put science fiction down and to hell with them! That's really nice coming from Doris Lessing."

"I sure like Doris Lessing."

"She might well wonder what took them so long. Doris Lessing is the ideal winner of the Nobel Prize. After all, the prize is about idealism, and was founded in the belief that writers can make the world a better place. Lessing can depict the world as a terrible place, peopled by terrorists, in which the women can be as violent as the men, and war can describe the planet entirely. But she never abandons the hope that the planet can be better, even if she has to imagine other planets to show how this is possible."

"Doris Lessing—always searching, always on her way to something new and different, what a range of intelligence, her every book a blow at artistic complacency. The Golden Notebook I consider her masterpiece."

"The assumption made by Rossi, that women are "innately" sexually oriented only toward men, and that made by Lessing, that the lesbian is simply acting out of her bitterness toward men, are by no means theirs alone; these assumptions are widely current in literature and in the social sciences."

"...The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, the extraordinary novel that changed my life and the lives of so many other young women in the 1960s."

"For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying."

"I have found it to be true that the older I've become the better my life has become."

"I have read a lot of Doris Lessing, and her interrogation of human behavior and history always makes a big impression on me."

"Trust no friend without faults, and love a maiden, but no angel."

"Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself."

"Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing."

"If there were a Mount Rushmore of twentieth-century authors, Doris Lessing would most certainly be carved upon it. Like Adrienne Rich, she was pivotal, situated at the moment when the gates of the gender-disparity castle were giving way, and women were faced with increased freedoms and choices, as well as increased challenges."

"Man, whence is he? / Too bad to be the work of a god, too good for the work of chance."

"Pearls mean tears."

"Better Counsel comes overnight."

"I, who ne'er Went for myself a begging, go a borrowing, And that for others. Borrowing's much the same As begging; just as lending upon usury Is much the same as thieving."

"It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important."

""Everything’s cracking up", says Anna, the protagonist of Lessing’s masterpiece, a novel that takes its place in this list for its odd, visionary engagement with the issues and anxieties of its time and also for its extraordinary grip on the literary imagination of the late 20th century, when Lessing (who lived to November 2013) was in her prime. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes this novel as “one of the key texts of the women’s movement of the 1960s", a reductive description that would have infuriated Lessing, partly because she hated to be pigeonholed, and also because she understood fiction to be infinitely more varied and complex than one “movement". Lessing’s work has always been difficult to define: a mix of classical realism, science-fiction, parable, memoir, fantasy and polemic. The Golden Notebook has many of these elements."

"I was taken around and shown things as a "useful idiot" […] that’s what my role was […] I can’t understand why I was so gullible."

"What is a hero without love for mankind?"

"The worst of superstitions is to think One's own most bearable."

"Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so."

"I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge."

"This has been going on for 30 years. I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."

"Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read."

"[On her first marriage ] I don't think marriages are like that now. It's when you walk into a role. The life was all laid down, what you ate, everything you did, and I went through it all as if it were a role in a play, really, and I hated it bitterly."

"I have to face the fact that I and my high-minded comrades, both those in that chimerical Communist Party in Southern Rhodesia, and many I have met since ... were of the stuff of those murderers with a clear conscience. We were lucky, that's all."

"Oh Christ. I couldn't care less. … I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."

"What matters most is that we learn from living."

"I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated."

"All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility."

"The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country. … I was really astounded that some people were shocked."

"Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing and the Children of Violence series. That again was actually a very positive influence upon me. I particularly liked her writing in the Children of Violence series: so down-to-earth and real! It made me think that this is the material that I have. It just relates to ordinary people that live ordinary lives, but, if Doris Lessing thinks it's important enough to record and the world agrees with her, then maybe I can use that same kind of material as well to make the points that I think should be made."

"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." It's a roll call of dead books."

"I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. … I knew I was moving into a new dimension, further from sanity than I had ever been."