Doris Lessing Quotes

152 Sourced Quotes

There are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.

Doris Lessing
If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.

Doris Lessing
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.

Doris Lessing
Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.

Doris Lessing
Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.

Doris Lessing
I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.

Doris Lessing
The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.

Doris Lessing
What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks. But we can't all be physicists.

Doris Lessing
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
I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

Doris Lessing
If we were to put into practice what we know... but that is the point.

Doris Lessing
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

Doris Lessing
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.

Doris Lessing
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
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
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

Doris Lessing
We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.

Doris Lessing
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
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.

Doris Lessing
It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.

Doris Lessing
Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.

Doris Lessing
Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.

Doris Lessing
I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that "other eye," which we can use to judge ourselves.

Doris Lessing
As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

Doris Lessing
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. This is what our function is.

Doris Lessing
The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.

Doris Lessing
People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating... an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.

Doris Lessing
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
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
But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.

Doris Lessing