Doris Lessing Quotes

152 Sourced Quotes

This has been going on for 30 years. I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush.

Doris Lessing
What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?

Doris Lessing
Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who would really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

Doris Lessing
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
This was life, that two people, no matter how carefully chosen, could not be everything to each other.

Doris Lessing
Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.

Doris Lessing
I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.

Doris Lessing
Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?

Doris Lessing
The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.

Doris Lessing
It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.

Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country. … I was really astounded that some people were shocked.

Doris Lessing
The words that I, Anna, write down are nothing, or like the secretions of a caterpillar that are forced out in ribbons to harden in the air.

Doris Lessing
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.

Doris Lessing
Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.

Doris Lessing
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

Doris Lessing
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. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves.

Doris Lessing
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.

Doris Lessing
All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.

Doris Lessing
Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.

Doris Lessing
My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

Doris Lessing
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Doris Lessing
Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

Doris Lessing
Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.

Doris Lessing
She set an attentive smile on her face, like a sentinel, behind which she could cultivate her own thoughts.

Doris Lessing
There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.

Doris Lessing
Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages — being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting.

Doris Lessing
All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

Doris Lessing
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.

Doris Lessing
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how.

Doris Lessing
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