There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. 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 vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

—Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, Introduction (1971)

(Robert Scott Horton)

Normal People E01

Book title: The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing

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. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."

Doris Lessing, 'The Golden Notebook' (1962)

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

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

This bookstore is selling signed copies of @neil-gaiman books and graphic novels while supplies last, if anyone wants to snap some up!

(How fitting that I bought my signed copy of Good Omens on the day I finally finished reading it for the first time lol)

From the Doris Lessing’s preface to The Golden Notebook

From Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

[From my flickr files]

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"Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.” 

Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook, 1962.

words. words. i play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what i want.

— doris lessing

“I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.”

~ Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

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