Ming > Ming's Quotes

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.”
― Honore de Balzac

“Be completely fearless. [...]Write without constraints, or worrying about who you represent, or whether you should represent anyone, or who your audience is, or what you can or can't do with a female character, or a black character, or someone of restricted growth, or someone who's hugely fat. You must write total confidence that the fiction is its own justification.”
― Zadie Smith

“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.”
― Doris Lessing

“I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“I am always amazed, in myself and in other women, at the strength of our need to bolster men up. This is ironical, living as we do in a time of men’s criticizing us for being ‘castrating’, etc., — all the other words and phrases of the same kind. (Nelson says his wife is ‘castrating’ — this makes me angry, thinking of the misery she must have lived through.) For the truth is, women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. Molly for instance. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create men.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“The nightmare takes various forms, comes in sleep, or in wakefulness, and can be pictured most simply like this: There is a blindfolded man standing with his back to the brick wall. He has been tortured nearly to death. Opposite him are six men with their rifles raised ready to shoot, commanded by a seventh, who has his hand raised, When he drops his hand, the shots will ring out, and the prisoner will fall dead. But suddenly there is something unexpected—yet not altogether unexpected, for the seventh has been listening all this while in case it happens. There is an outburst of shouting and fighting in the street outside. The six men look in query at their officer, the seventh. The officer stands waiting to see how the fighting outside will resolve itself. There is a shout: ‘We have won!’ At which the officer crosses the space to the wall, unties the bound man, and stands in his place. The man, hitherto bound, now binds the other. There is a moment, and this is the moment of horror in the nightmare, when they smile at each other: It is a brief, bitter, accepting smile. They are brothers in that smile. The smile holds a terrible truth that I want to evade. Because it cancels all creative emotion. The offer, the seventh, now stands blindfolded and waiting with his back to the wall. The former prisoner walks to the firing squad who are still standing with their weapons ready. He lifts his hand, then drops it. The shots ring out, and the body by the wall falls twitching. The six soldiers are shaken and sick; now they will go and drink to drown the memory of their murder. But the man who was bound, is now free, smiles as they stumble away, cursing and hating him, just as they would have cursed and hated the other, now dead. And in this man’s smile at the six innocent soldiers there is a terrible understanding irony. This is the nightmare.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“In the confusions of the next hours the Earth’s population was substantially reduced, the biosphere was altered, and the Earth itself was marked with numbers of more conventional craters. For some years thereafter the survivors were existentially preoccupied and the peculiar dustbowl at Bonneville was left to weather by itself in the changing climatic cycles.

"The Man Who Walked Home”
― James Tiptree, Jr.

“Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you for rejecting me by never being there, fuck you for making me feel like shit about myself, fuck you for bleeding the fucking love and life out of me, fuck my father for fucking up my life for good and fuck my mother for not leaving him, but most of all, fuck you God for making me love a person who does not exist.
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU.”
― Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

“Once you have perceived that life is very cruel, the only response is to live with as much humanity, humour and freedom as you can.”
― Sarah Kane

“I am an emotional plagiarist, stealing other people's pain, subsuming it into my own until I can't remember whose it is any more.”
― Sarah Kane

“This is because Marxism looks at things as a whole and in relation to each other—or tries to, but its limitations are not the point for the moment. A person who has been influenced by Marxism takes it for granted that an event in Siberia will affect one in Botswana. I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time [written in 1971], 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.”
― Doris Lessing

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Everything is funny, if you can laugh at it.”
― Lewis Carroll

“One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.”
― Doris Lessing

“As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave—that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, here idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed—yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.”
― Doris Lessing

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Finally, if you attempt to read this without working through a significant number of exercises (see §0.0.1), I will come to your house and pummel you with [Gr-EGA] until you beg for mercy. It is important to not just have a vague sense of what is true, but to be able to actually get your hands dirty. As Mark Kisin has said, “You can wave your hands all you want, but it still won’t make you fly.”
― Ravi Vakil, Foundations of Algebraic Geometry

“This crisp September morning, Georgina was looking equally crisp: she had an apple-green scarf knotted at her white swan throat and a short swingy patterned dress that served to highlight her long long legs that didn’t appear to get any wider as they went up. Over the top she was wearing a navy frock coat that clung to her waist and flared out in folds around her violin-shaped hips. All in all, she looked like she should be striding down Carnaby Street a few decades ago with men who looked like a young Michael Caine lowering their spectacles and wolf-whistling.

She was clearly a bitch. I just had to find hard evidence.”
― Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me At Hello

“Don't let self-imposed, unnecessary restrictions limit your thinking. Whenever you encounter a problem, it is worth spending a minute (or more) asking the question: 'Am I imposing rules that I don't need to? Can I change or bend the rules to my advantage?”
― Paul Zeitz, The Art and Craft of Problem Solving

“There is very seldom any true secret.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Deep Secret

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“But then, oh, my blessed, he smiled. I guess from that moment I knew I was going to marry Joseph Wojtkiewicz--God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable name and all. For when he smiled, he looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters.”
― Katherine Paterson, Jacob Have I Loved