Top 100 Doris Quotes
#1. There will be some one at the White House whom you will like more than me," Roosevelt had predicted during his final meeting with the press corps, "but not one who will interest you more.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#2. After ministering each day to the hundreds of young men who had endured ghastly wounds, submitted to amputations without anesthesia, and often died without the comfort of family or friends, Whitman wrote, nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as it used to.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#3. My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
Doris Lessing
#5. My best advice for
you, honey, is to stop if you possibly can! And if you just can't, then get ready to work
like hell. Hang onto your day job. And remember, you may not make a living, but you'll
make a wonderful life.
Doris Betts
#6. The people "placed me in an office of the highest dignity and charged me with the duty of maintaining that dignity and proper respect for the office on the part of my subordinates. . . . By your own conduct you have destroyed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#7. You know, 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.
Doris Lessing
#8. Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
Doris Lessing
#9. We demand that the government of Canada force Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris. Why do this, you may ask? Because it'll be fun.
Rick Mercer
#10. The politician, Johnson's experience had taught him, could make promises without keeping them; words spoken in public had little relation to the practical conduct of daily life. But whatever justification a politician may claim for deceptions, the statesman must align his words with his action.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#11. Five Life Standards of Voluntary Simplicity
Do Justice
Learn from the World Community
Nurture People
Cherish the Natural Order
Non-Conform Freely.
Doris Janzen Longacre
#12. 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
#13. She could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.
Doris Lessing
#14. I couldn't walk for almost three years. That was the greatest thing that happened. Instead of dancing, I sang.
Doris Day
#15. We have no children Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children. You have one child.
Doris Lessing
#17. The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
Doris Lessing
#18. Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.
Doris Lessing
#19. My last picture for Warners was Romance on the High Seas. It was Doris Day's first picture; that was before she became a virgin.
Oscar Levant
#20. If a man does something silly, people say, 'Isn't he silly?' If a woman does something silly, people say, 'Aren't women silly?
Doris Day
#21. Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
Doris Lessing
#22. I'm giving my whole life to breaking the butterfly of a John Rockefeller upon the wheel of my ponderous articles,
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#23. You can't show me an ad on TV with hard bodies and say I have to buy that car. You have to tell me why that car is better and safer than another car.
Doris Roberts
#24. I write about presidents. That means I write about guys - so far. I'm interested in the people closest to them, the people they love and the people they've lost ... I don't want to limit it to what they did in the office, but what happens at home and in their interactions with other people.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#25. Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
#26. It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
#27. I felt the joy of knowing that in some small way I had fought back against someone who wanted to rule me against my will. I said no.
Doris Mortman
#28. We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
Doris Lessing
#29. And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#30. My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.
Doris Lessing
#31. 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
#32. If there is a Heaven, I'm sure Rock Hudson is there because he was such a kind person.
Doris Day
#33. I liked being married instead of the girl who's looking for a guy.
Doris Day
#34. The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.
Doris Grumbach
#35. DAY: I have a good job, a lovely apartment, I go out with very nice men to the best places, the finest restaurants, the theater. What am I missing? RITTER: If you hove to ask, believe me, you're missing it.
Doris Day
#36. Often our students see nothing about religious faith except the lowest common denominator. They see nothing but TV evangelists and fools, and it doesn't occur to them that intelligent people might find this religious business worth living their lives by.
Doris Betts
#37. Journalism still, in a democracy, is the essential force to get the public educated and mobilized to take action on behalf of our ancient ideals.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#39. I find that without a place to work, it is difficult to work. I look forward with the greatest pleasure to the use of my books at night at home.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#40. The kitchen table is where we mark milestones, divulge dreams, bury hatchets, make deals, give thanks, plan vacations, and tell jokes. It's also where children learn the lessons that families teach: manners, cooperation, communication, self-control, values.
Doris Christopher
#41. That very afternoon, Taft fell seriously ill with what doctors mistakenly diagnosed as dengue fever. He remained bedridden for ten days, and when he returned to work, severe rectal pain prevented him from sitting. At the same time, a fungal infection developed in his groin.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#43. The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau - but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.
Doris Lessing
#44. Fearing that Taft would be too reticent on the stump, Roosevelt barraged him with incessant advice. "Do not answer Bryan; attack him!" he counseled in early September, adding, "Don't let him make the issues.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#45. We are being punished, that's all." "What for?" he demanded, already on guard because there was a tone in her voice he hated. "For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would be.
Doris Lessing
#47. All one needs to write a story is one feeling and four walls.
Doris Betts
#48. The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#50. 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
#51. We have a duty to look after each other. If we lose control of our government, then we lose our ability to dispense justice and human kindness. Our first priority today, then, is to defeat utterly those forces of greed and corruption that have come between us and our self-governance.
Doris "Granny D" Haddock
#52. Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?" "Yes," Ted had said. "Then I can't help you," Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy
Doris Lessing
#53. 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
#54. FDR once said he was like a cat, that he would pounce and then relax. That's much harder to do in the 24-hour cable world, because it's almost like the press demands of you to be saying something or doing something every day.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#55. Hearst's papers and magazines" were his intended target and promised his speech would clarify that he abhorred "the whitewash brush quite as much as of mud slinging.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#56. I don't know if I want to get married again.
Doris Day
#57. I really believe that what happens one day affects the next, and I think that came from that experience of learning that if I told the score inning by inning, play by play, it built up to its natural climax.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#58. Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
Doris Lessing
#59. Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
Doris Lessing
#60. Simon Cameron: I loved my brother, as only the poor and lonely can love those with whom they have toiled and struggled up the rugged hill of life's success - but he died bravely in the discharge of his duty.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#61. When you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#62. 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
#63. It was the only ambition I ever had - not to be a dancer or Hollywood movie star, but to be a housewife in a good marriage.
Doris Day
#64. Manet also had an argument with Degas, the end result being that they each returned paintings that they had previous given to each other.
Doris Lanier
#65. When Taft gives way to his (anger), one reporter observed, it is to inflict a merciless thrashing upon its victim, for whom thereafter he has no use whatsoever. With Roosevelt is a case of powder and spark; there is a vivid flash and a deafening roar, but when the smoke is blown away, it is the end.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#66. A friend drops their plans when you're in trouble, shares joy in your accomplishments, feels sad when you're in pain. A friend encourages your dreams and offers advice
but when you don't follow it, they still respect and love you.
Doris Wild Helmering
#67. I used to sit near Marilyn Monroe in the Actor's Studio. She'd get dressed up because that was her identity. Sad. Those cameras wouldn't leave her alone. She didn't know where to hide.
Doris Roberts
#68. 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
#69. Admiral Dahlgren's twenty-one-year-old son, Ulric, had lost a leg at Gettysburg. When he appeared at a Washington party, he was surrounded by pretty girls. They stayed by his side all night, refusing to dance, in tribute to the handsome colonel who had been known as an expert waltzer.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#70. Modernizing the postal service was particularly important for the soldiers, who relied on letters, newspapers, and magazines from home to sustain morale.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#71. I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#72. But me and my sister knew all the Doris Day and Frank Sinatra songs, too.
Chaka Khan
#73. I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
Doris Lessing
#74. There are but a handful of times in the history of our country when there occurs a transformation so remarkable that a molt seems to take place, and an altered country begins to emerge.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#75. Walt Whitman, who worked as a nurse in the hospital wards, that the harrowing experience made one's "little cares and difficulties" disappear "into nothing.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#76. 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
#78. Her look at him was now as aggressive as his had been. 'It's all very well for you, you're a man,' she said bitterly, and entirely without coquetry; but he said flippantly, even suggestively, 'It will be all quite well for you too!
Doris Lessing
#79. I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
Doris Lessing
#80. Mother's room, and mother's need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights.
Doris Lessing
#81. The trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn't simple.
Doris Janzen Longacre
#82. 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
#85. 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
#86. Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.
Edmund White
#87. Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
#88. If I can do it, you can do it. Anybody can.
Doris Day
#89. 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
#90. The human community is evolving ... We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.
Doris Lessing
#91. When she returned to the office, she found that Mr Jasper Cohen had gone abruptly on holiday. His son had been killed in Spain - he had been shot, near Madrid, rather more than a year before; a friend of his had written, on returning safe to England, to tell his father so.
Doris Lessing
#92. It is surprising," Roosevelt explained, "how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#93. Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#94. For your penance, say two Hail Marys, three our Fathers, and," he added, with a chuckle, "say a special prayer for the Dodgers.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#95. 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
#96. What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
Doris Lessing
#97. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
Doris Lessing
#98. I'm not sure that finding a husband at university made me any less of a feminist or an academic. I still soaked up Susan Faludi; I still read Doris Lessing. But I did it at the same time I met someone who I felt was my soulmate.
Janine Di Giovanni
#99. When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.
Doris Lessing
#100. 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
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