Doris Lessing Quotes

152 Sourced Quotes

There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a few days before, words like democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of understanding of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power. I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I. I. I. I. of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war; and I knew how strong these emotions were, in a way that would never leave me, would become part of how I saw the world.

Doris Lessing
When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.

Doris Lessing
None of you [men] ask for anything—except everything, but just for so long as you need it.

Doris Lessing
You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?

Doris Lessing
Reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

Doris Lessing
You are young, and then you are middle-aged, but it is hard to tell the moment of passage from one state to the next. Then you are old, but you hardly know when it happened.

Doris Lessing
If you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.

Doris Lessing
How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.

Doris Lessing
I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. … I knew I was moving into a new dimension, further from sanity than I had ever been.

Doris Lessing
Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.

Doris Lessing
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

Doris Lessing
I was taken around and shown things as a "useful idiot" … that's what my role was … I can't understand why I was so gullible.

Doris Lessing
The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation. It's heart-breaking how often I have to say when I'm giving talks, "This book is out of print. This book is out of print." It's a roll call of dead books.

Doris Lessing
Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

Doris Lessing
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
Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing.

Doris Lessing
For my father, who used to sit, hour after hour, night after night, outside our house in Africa, watching the stars "Well," he would say, "if we blow ourselves up, there's plenty more where we came from!"

Doris Lessing
Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it.

Doris Lessing
The kitten was six weeks old. It was enchanting, a delicate fairy-tale cat, whose Siamese genes showed in the shape of the face, ears, tail, and the subtle lines of its body. [...] She sat, a tiny thing, in the middle of a yellow carpet, surrounded by five worshipppers, not at all afraid of us. Then she stalked around that floor of the house, inspecting every inch of it, climbed up on to my bed, crept under the fold of a sheet, and was at home.

Doris Lessing
I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, 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
For real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends.

Doris Lessing
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
Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

Doris Lessing
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
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
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

Doris Lessing
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

Doris Lessing
The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.

Doris Lessing
When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

Doris Lessing
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

Doris Lessing