Top 100 Doris's Quotes
#1. I cant' believe Doris's hair is real too.'
'All but the colour ...
Cecelia Ahern
#2. 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
#4. Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
Doris Lessing
#5. I love to laugh.It's the only way to live. Enjoy each day-it's not coming back again!
Doris Day
#6. Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#7. I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.
Doris Lessing
#8. 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
#10. It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
Doris Lessing
#11. Roosevelt's strength was that he understood he would never get anything through the Republican old guard, his party, unless the public pressured Congress.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#13. In the long sentences of the president's message, semicolons followed by "yet" or "but" separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt's characteristic "on the one hand, on the other" style of crediting antagonistic views.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#14. I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
Doris Lessing
#15. I'm not going to go around with a long face - that's a waste of time
Doris Day
#16. 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
#17. Killing an animal to make a coat is sin. It wasn't meant to be, and we have no right to do it. A woman gains status when she refuses to see anything killed to be put on her back. Then she's truly beautiful.
Doris Day
#18. To make a long story short, there's nothing like having a boss walk in.
Doris Lilly
#20. No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
#21. It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'
Doris Lessing
#22. It's intoxicating for a man to be waited on. Combine this with very, very skillful sex, and that will get them.
Doris Lilly
#23. It has been said that the body is like an automobile - it's yours, but it isn't you.
Doris Day
#24. I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.
Doris Lessing
#25. Doris Day was such a big movie and TV star, people overlooked her singing. The proof is in the package. She's one of the best singers there ever was.
Margaret Whiting
#26. A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
Doris Lessing
#27. When a person disappears, everything becomes impregnated with that person's presence. Every single object as well as every space becomes a reminder of absence, as if absence were more important than presence.
Doris Salcedo
#28. I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
Doris Lessing
#29. For real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends.
Doris Lessing
#30. A continuity isn't necessarily right, just because it's a continuity.'
'Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is,
Doris Lessing
#31. I have plenty of information now, but I can't get it into words. I'm afraid it's too big a task for me. I wonder if I will find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell. Theodore Roosevelt, writing in naval history in his spare time while in law school
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#32. I am deeply grateful to the President and to my country ... To come from Cincinnati, Ohio, for God's sake, then to go to Hollywood, and to get this kind of tribute from my country ... I love this country so much.
Doris Day
#33. When I go, if there's a tombstone it will say, She doesn't give in. She doesn't give up. And she never takes no for an answer.
Doris Roberts
#34. As I was saying, that's the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream.
Doris Lessing
#35. I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.
Doris Lessing
#36. By privately endorsing Seward's spirit of compromise while projecting an unyielding public image, President-elect Lincoln retained an astonishing degree of control over an increasingly chaotic and potentially devastating situation.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#37. Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
Doris Lessing
#38. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
Doris Lessing
#39. There's no magazine you open, unless its AARP, that shows a woman over the age of 45 in any other light, other than having to buy Depends or Viagra.
Doris Roberts
#41. Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
Doris Lessing
#42. I like joy; I want to be joyous. I want to smile and I want to make people laugh. And that's all I want. I like being happy. I want to make others happy.
Doris Day
#43. The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
#44. THE HONEYEATER story was mesmerizing: the story took hold of me and I felt compelled to write it. I was also inspired by a few female authors (among them, Doris Lessing and Isabel Allende) I've admired over the years
women who preceded me and who gave me the courage to even begin.
Yolanda A. Reid
#45. It's quite an experience to have filming done in your house. When they come in, they photograph every piece of furniture and where it is so they can get them back exactly where you had them. You'd never know they'd been here.
Doris Day
#46. There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Doris Lessing
#47. The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#48. One of my favorite stores in the Old Town is Buchbinderei. It's this tiny stationery shop where the owner, Doris Feldman, makes these beautiful hand-bound notebooks I always buy for gifts.
Daniel Humm
#49. Lincoln's ability to retain his emotional balance in such difficult situations was rooted in actute self-awareness and an enormous capacity to dispel anxiety in constructive ways.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#50. If the spirited crowd expected a speech exalting recent Union victories, they were disappointed. In keeping with his lifelong tendency to consider all sides of a troubled situation, Lincoln urged a more sympathetic understanding of the nation's alienated citizens in the South.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#51. Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarrelling, had probably attracted the mongol child - yes, yes, of course she knew one shouldn't call them mongol.
Doris Lessing
#52. I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
Doris Lessing
#53. The press of visitors, a New York Times reporter observed, never seemed "to try the President's strength or impair his good temper." At one o'clock, Roosevelt
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#56. 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
#57. What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
Doris Lessing
#58. 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
#59. As S. S. McClure well understood, the "vitality of democracy" depends on "popular knowledge of complex questions." At
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Mother's room, and mother's need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights.
Doris Lessing
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
Doris Lessing
#66. 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
#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. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. I liked being married instead of the girl who's looking for a guy.
Doris Day
#74. It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Listen Anna, if we don't believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there's no hope for us. We're going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.
Doris Lessing
#78. One keeps one's friends better when one is alone. The corollary to this is that one loses one's friends, slowly, when one sees them too often or when they visit for too long a time.
Doris Grumbach
#79. Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
Doris Lessing
#80. We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we're moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who's to stop it - us?
Doris Lessing
#81. Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#82. If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.
Doris Lessing
#83. There's something here that I simply will not let myself look at.
Doris Lessing
#84. I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing's Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.
Susie Bright
#85. 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
#86. The point is, it seems to me that my mind is a mass of totally contradictory attitudes about everything.' 'Everyone's mind is a mass of contradictory attitudes. Why should it matter?' 'It should matter to us, surely?
Doris Lessing
#87. Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
Doris Lessing
#88. It was Andrew Jackson's motto, he reminded, that if you temporize, you are lost.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#89. I'm learning something all the time. That's the way I want it to go, and that's the way I'll go until I am no longer on this planet.
Doris Roberts
#90. If he (Teddy Roosevelt) lacked Will Taft's immediate charisma, gradually his classmates could not resist the spell of his highly original personality.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#91. In the reflected gaze of his (her husband's) steady admiration, she saw the face of the girl he had fallen in love with.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#92. 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.
Doris Lessing
#93. I love Judy Garland, I love Doris Day, I love Marilyn Monroe. I love everything that comes from that era. The music is just beautiful and powerful - and simple. That's what makes it so great.
Emmy Rossum
#94. When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country's cause.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#95. Doris Lessing really doesn't care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn't want that in her head. She's going where she's going, and that's where she wants to go.
Salman Rushdie
#96. Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
Doris Lessing
#97. I have never found in a human being loyalty that is comparable to a dog's loyalty.
Doris Day
#98. I've discovered, I guess, that it's fun to work.
Doris Duke
#99. When you love to run and you train hard enough to really feel it, running is all about freedom. Also, I find that sharing the value of our sport is very important. When I think back on my life, it isn't the winning that I remember so much, it's the people who I met through running.
Doris Brown Heritage
#100. If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let's make a foursome!
Doris Lessing
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