Doris Lessing quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Doris Lessing on Wise Famous Quotes.

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!

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

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

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

There is absolutely nothing like love for showing how many different people can live inside one skin.

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.

The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her. - BARON CORVO

I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.

You won't change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.

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

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

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

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

I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.

We have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

Looking back over nearly a quarter of a century, she saw that that had been the characteristic of her life -passivity, adaptability to others.

Cats mean kittens, plentiful and frequent.

For there is never any way to go but in.

I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.

Or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

It is not too much to say that when the word "blood" is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.

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

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

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

What matters most is that we learn from living.

Mother's room, and mother's need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record,

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.

A hundred things to do, but only one thing to be," he said, obstinately. "But perhaps I don't feel myself worthy of such a wealth of opportunity?

I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.

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

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

Writers do not come out of houses without books.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares ...

Now, I am not Anna, I have no will, I can't move out of a situation once it has started, I just go along with it.

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

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.

Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

People who lack economic and social power often expand their physical impact on the world."
"-In Pursuit of Silence

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

There's something here that I simply will not let myself look at.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

We need a shape for the tale. A beginning, a middle and an end.

Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.

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

I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.

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

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

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty ... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

She wanted to be acknowledged, her predicament given its value.

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

The thing is, I haven't changed at all.

What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroyeth much good.

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.

There is only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

I watched his face put on that mask of bluff, goodnatured tolerance which is the mask of corruption in this particular time (for

A writer is the conscience of the world.

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.

I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.

I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

We have no children Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children. You have one child.

Men are unwise and curiously planned.

As always he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul.

It's very interesting what you don't care about.

Choose? When do I ever choose? Have I ever chosen?