Doris Lessing quotes

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
-- Doris Lessing

#Thank You #Prayer #Grateful

Every child has the capacity to be everything.
-- Doris Lessing

#Children #Capacity

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
-- Doris Lessing

#Inspirational #Truth #Terrible

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

#Creativity #Thinking #Cases

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

#Mean #Thinking #People

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
-- Doris Lessing

#Song #Humanity #Legacy

The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.
-- Doris Lessing

#Stars #Men #Space

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

#Inspirational #Success #Opportunity

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

#Jobs #Truth #Writing

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

#Education #Learning #Understanding

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
-- Doris Lessing

#Giving Up #Hard Work #Writing

If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.
-- Doris Lessing

#Dog #People #One Day

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
-- Doris Lessing

#Movement #Revolutionary #Stage

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

#Jobs #Book #Thinking

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

#Play #Want #Chance

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
-- Doris Lessing

#Book #Reading #Doors

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

#Cat #Air #Water

What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend, the cat who purrs as you stroke, or rub his chin, or scratch his head.
-- Doris Lessing

#Lonely #Cat #Eye

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
-- Doris Lessing

#Interviews #Looks #Television

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
-- Doris Lessing

#Worry #Fame

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
-- Doris Lessing

#Real #People #Democracy

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
-- Doris Lessing

#People #Priorities #Important

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
-- Doris Lessing

#Men #Conservative #Adventurous

My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
-- Doris Lessing

#Father #Rage

What matters most is that we learn from living.
-- Doris Lessing

#Life #Witty #What Matters

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

#Matter #Want #Emotion

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
-- Doris Lessing

#Numbers #Focus #Alternatives

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
-- Doris Lessing

#Book #Writing #Past

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.
-- Doris Lessing

#Pain #Growing Up #Writing

It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
-- Doris Lessing

#Children #Belief #Talent

Literature is analysis after the event.
-- Doris Lessing

#Events #Analysis #Literature

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
-- Doris Lessing

#Giving #Way #Emotion

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
-- Doris Lessing

#Art #Mirrors #Betrayed

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

#Love #Inspirational #Needs

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

#Writing #Law #Novel

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
-- Doris Lessing

#Book #Doors #Fifty

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

#Book #Succeed #Process

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

#Fiction #Records #Factual

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

#Wiser

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.
-- Doris Lessing

#Writing #Animal #Way

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

#Memorable #Learning #College

What is a hero without love for mankind.
-- Doris Lessing

#Love #Hero #Heroic

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.
-- Doris Lessing

#Writing

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants.
-- Doris Lessing

#Tyrants #Library #World

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

#Children #Lying #Book

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

#Book #Reading #Thought Provoking

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
-- Doris Lessing

#Design #Recognition #Impossible

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
-- Doris Lessing

#Love #Trust #Angel

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

#Writing #Important #Care

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.
-- Doris Lessing

#Advice #Independence #Judgment

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

#Women #People #Focus