Top 100 Doris Lessing Quotes
#1. My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
Doris Lessing
#2. All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
Doris Lessing
#3. Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.
Doris Lessing
#4. Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
Doris Lessing
#5. Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
#6. Then he said, 'Well, Matty, we don't seem to go together at all, do we. I'm simply not broadminded enough for your Jews and your niggers.
Doris Lessing
#8. Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
Doris Lessing
#9. Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same
to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
Doris Lessing
#10. 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.
Doris Lessing
#11. It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.
Doris Lessing
#12. I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.
Doris Lessing
#13. Martha Quest, who thought of herself as so adventurous, so free and unbounded - the fact was, even the idea of picking up a telephone and making herself known to a new person troubled her: she made excuses, she could not do it.
Doris Lessing
#14. When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
Doris Lessing
#15. Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
#16. You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.
Doris Lessing
#17. It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I've seen it over and over again. If
Doris Lessing
#18. She put that book down and picked up Ellis. Now, it is hardly possible to be bored by a book on sex when one is fifteen, but she was restless because this collection of interesting facts seemed to have so little to do with her own problems.
Doris Lessing
#19. I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
Doris Lessing
#20. All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
Doris Lessing
#21. Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
Doris Lessing
#22. If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing
#23. [On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable?
Doris Lessing
#24. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
Doris Lessing
#25. So much of my life has been twisted and painful that now when happiness floods right through me like being flooded over with warm glittering blue water, I can't believe it. I say to myself: I am Anna Wulf, this is me, Anna, and I'm happy.
Doris Lessing
#26. 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
#27. Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing
#28. At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
Doris Lessing
#29. It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
Doris Lessing
#30. If someone cracks up, what does that mean? At what point does a person about to fall to pieces say: I'm cracking up? And if I were to crack up, what form would it take?
Doris Lessing
#31. Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
Doris Lessing
#33. In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing
#34. The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
Doris Lessing
#35. I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
Doris Lessing
#36. Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Doris Lessing
#37. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.
Doris Lessing
#38. You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
Doris Lessing
#39. That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
#40. We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.
Doris Lessing
#41. For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
Doris Lessing
#42. I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.
Doris Lessing
#43. Perhaps it is not correct to say that she read it, for unfortunately the number of people who actually read magazines, papers or even books is very small indeed.
Doris Lessing
#44. The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
Doris Lessing
#45. He had decided not to be angry: it was killing him.
Doris Lessing
#46. No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
#47. None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
Doris Lessing
#48. When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
Doris Lessing
#49. They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
Doris Lessing
#50. When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author
then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.
Doris Lessing
#51. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
#52. After a certain age - and for some of us that can be very young - there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before ...
Doris Lessing
#53. I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.
Doris Lessing
#54. But far within him something cried For the great tragedy to start, The pang in lingering mercy fall And sorrow break upon his heart. - EDWIN MUIR
Doris Lessing
#55. When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.
Doris Lessing
#56. Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing.
Doris Lessing
#57. Yes, it's because it's one thing to think poor things and another to allow that African politics could have any resemblance at all to English politics - even such a long time ago.
Doris Lessing
#58. On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn't discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East.
Doris Lessing
#59. If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
Doris Lessing
#60. For many thousands of years people had looked at expensive heads of hair and thought of how much food and warmth they represented, so obviously it was a thought of no use at all, so why bother to have it? But thoughts of this sort did go ticking on, useless or not.
Doris Lessing
#61. I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
Doris Lessing
#62. The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
#63. This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
Doris Lessing
#64. Writers do not come out of houses without books.
Doris Lessing
#65. God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.
Doris Lessing
#66. Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.
Doris Lessing
#68. There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
Doris Lessing
#70. It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
Doris Lessing
#71. 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.
Doris Lessing
#72. Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Doris Lessing
#73. Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroyeth much good.
Doris Lessing
#74. I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.
Doris Lessing
#75. The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
Doris Lessing
#76. Victim-eyes of impersonal tragedy, to be impersonal no longer.
Doris Lessing
#77. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about, unnoticed and invisible.
Doris Lessing
#78. The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
Doris Lessing
#79. However, there are certain rites in the talk of matrons, and Martha, having listened to such talk for a large part of her life, should have learned that there was nothing insulting, or even personal, intended. She was merely expected to play the part 'young girl' against their own familiar roles.
Doris Lessing
#80. Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.
Doris Lessing
#81. Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares ...
Doris Lessing
#82. I suddenly saw her quite differently. I saw that she was a person. Not my mother. She had thought it all out. She had wanted to commit suicide. She would never commit suicide. On that night I grew up. Or so I would like to believe.
Doris Lessing
#83. If you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies.
Doris Lessing
#84. It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.
Doris Lessing
#85. I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
Doris Lessing
#86. Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.
Doris Lessing
#87. I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.
Doris Lessing
#88. You're suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it.
Doris Lessing
#89. Could we have seen this efflorescence of stupidity? Yes, because every mass political movement unleashes the worst in human behaviour and admires it. For a time at least.
Doris Lessing
#90. Oh, I simply can't think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is
Doris Lessing
#91. My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
Doris Lessing
#92. Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
Doris Lessing
#93. When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now
where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
Doris Lessing
#94. One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
Doris Lessing
#95. Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.
Doris Lessing
#96. I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.
Doris Lessing
#97. You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
#98. There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
Doris Lessing
#99. What matters most is that we learn from living.
Doris Lessing
#100. We try to have things both ways. We've always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn't treat us by rule?
Doris Lessing
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