Doris Lessing Quotes:

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

Topics: Thank You, Prayer, Grateful

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

Topics: Children, Capacity, Just Be Yourself, Listen To Yourself, Biographers

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

Topics: Inspirational, Truth, Terrible, Abstraction

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

Topics: 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.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1981). “The Golden Notebook”, Bantam

Topics: Mean, Thinking, People, Golden Notebook

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Stars, Men, Space, Empty Places, Filled Up

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

source: - "Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing". Book by Larry Chang, 2006.

Topics: Inspirational, Success, Opportunity, Given Opportunity, Golden Notebook

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

Topics: Jobs, Truth, Writing, Better Jobs

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

source: - DORIS LESSING (1969). “THE FOUR-GATED CITY”

Topics: Education, Learning, Understanding, Inspirational Learning, Learning Life

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.

Topics: Giving Up, Hard Work, Writing, Creative Writing, Whole Truth

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.

Topics: Dog, People, One Day, Withered, Small Dogs

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.

Topics: Movement, Revolutionary, Stage, Reformers

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.

Topics: Jobs, Book, Thinking

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

Topics: Play, Want, Chance

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

Topics: Cat, Air, Water, Diagrams

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.

Topics: Lonely, Cat, Eye, Panthers, Cold Night

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.

Topics: Interviews, Looks, Television

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

Topics: Worry, Fame, Posthumous

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.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Real, People, Democracy, Golden Notebook

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

Topics: People, Priorities, Important, Top Priorities

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

Topics: Men, Conservative, Adventurous, Despite

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

Topics: Father, Rage

What matters most is that we learn from living.

source: - "Permission to Play: Taking Time to Renew Your Smile". Book by Jill Murphy Long, 2003.

Topics: 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...

Topics: Matter, Want, Emotion, Golden Notebook

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.

Topics: Numbers, Focus, Alternatives, Golden Notebook

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.

Topics: Book, Writing, Past, Think For Yourself, Love Literature

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.

Topics: Pain, Growing Up, Writing, Pain Pleasure, Personal Problems

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.

Topics: Children, Belief, Talent

Literature is analysis after the event.

Topics: Events, Analysis, Literature, Golden Notebook

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

Topics: Giving, Way, Emotion

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

Topics: Art, Mirrors, Betrayed, Golden Notebook

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.

Topics: Love, Inspirational, Needs, Golden Notebook, Second Rate

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

Topics: Writing, Law, Novel

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

Topics: Book, Succeed, Process, Book Publishing

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

Topics: Fiction, Records, Factual

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

source: - "Doris Lessing: key quotes". www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2013.

Topics: Wiser, Wiser You

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.

Topics: Writing, Animal, Way

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

Topics: Memorable, Learning, College, Golden Notebook

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Topics: Love, Hero, Heroic

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

Topics: Writing

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

Topics: Tyrants, Library, World

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.

Topics: Book, Reading, Thought Provoking, Golden Notebook

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

source: - "The Golden Notebook". Book by Doris Lessing, www.theguardian.com. 1962.

Topics: Design, Recognition, Impossible

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

Topics: Love, Trust, Angel, Love Without Trust, Golden Notebook

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.

Topics: Writing, Important, Care, Please Yourself

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.

Topics: Advice, Independence, Judgment, Young Writers

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.

Topics: Women, People, Focus, Positive Things

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

source: - Doris Lessing (2013). “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside”, p.3, Harper Collins

Topics: Strong, Thinking, Civilization

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

source: - "Grande dame of letters who’s not going quietly". Interview with Amanda Craig, www.thetimes.co.uk. November 23, 2003.

Topics: Inspirational, Creativity, Thinking, Think For Yourself, Golden Notebook

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

source: - "A hunger for books" by Doris Lessing, www.theguardian.com. December 8, 2007.

Topics: Dream, Hurt, Phoenix

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

Topics: Spiritual, Way, Coincidence

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

Topics: Education, Educational, Indoctrination, Golden Notebook

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

source: - "A Notorious Life". Interview with Dwight Garner, www.salon.com. November 11, 1997.

Topics: People, Perspective, Looks, Astounded

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1997). “Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962”

Topics: Years, Parent

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

source: - The Sunday Times (London), May 10, 1992.

Topics: Birthday, Time, Years, Elders, Growing Old

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Rivers, Literature, Oblivion

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

source: - Doris May Lessing (1988). “The making of the representative for Planet 8”, Vintage

Topics: Children, Immature, Doe

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

source: - "Grande dame of letters who’s not going quietly". Interview with Amanda Craig, www.thetimes.co.uk. November 23, 2003.

Topics: Children, Lying, Inspiration

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

Topics: Children, Intelligent, Boring, Intelligent Women

I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.

source: - "Lay off men, Lessing tells feminists" by Fiachra Gibbons, www.theguardian.com. August 14, 2001.

Topics: Men, Culture, Shocked

It has become a kind of religion that you can't criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not. It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests ... Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did.

source: - "Lay off men, Lessing tells feminists" by Fiachra Gibbons, www.theguardian.com. August 14, 2001.

Topics: Stupid, Fighting, Intelligent

Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1997). “Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962”

Topics: Envy, Moral, Behinds, Moral Indignation

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

source: - "The Sunday Times", May 10, 1992.

Topics: Party, Views, Self, Political Correctness, Continuum

The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.

Topics: Two, Feminism, Pills, Washing Machines

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “Under my skin”

Topics: Cutting, Names, People

I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.

Topics: Solitude, Treasure, Contact

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

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “Under my skin”

Topics: Clever, People, Stupidity

Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.

source: - Interview with Jonah Raskin, progressive.org. November 19, 2013.

Topics: Hate, Years, Important, Equanimity, Stiffness

Women are slaves to their beauty.

source: - Doris Lessing (2010). “Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5”, p.159, Vintage

Topics: Women, Slave, Women Beauty

Intelligence forbids tears.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1989). “The Doris Lessing Reader”, Jonathan Cape

Topics: Intelligence, Tears

It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.

source: - Doris Lessing (2013). “Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962 (Text Only)”, p.32, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Children, Stupid, Understanding

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do."

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.16, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Children, Sorry, School, Indoctrination, Golden Notebook

For there is never any way to go but in.

Topics: Way

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

Topics: Begging You, Stealing, Lending

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.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1992). “Canopus in Argos: Archives”

Topics: Thinking, Years, Different

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

Topics: Work, Age, Lasts

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

source: - Doris Lessing (2010). “Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5”, p.453, Vintage

Topics: Thought Provoking, Youth, Provoking

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

Topics: Thinking, Lakes, Lovely, Untrue

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.

source: - "The Golden Notebook". Book by Doris Lessing (1962), Introduction, 1971 edition.

Topics: Book, Doors, Bores You, Bookshops

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.9, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Women, Thinking, Numbers

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

Topics: People, Fame, Deserve

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.

source: - "A Notorious Life". Interview with Dwight Garner, www.salon.com. November 11, 1997.

Topics: Party, Reality, People, Moral Superiority, Third Parties

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

source: - Doris May Lessing (1992). “Canopus in Argos: Archives”

Topics: Stupid, Believe, Devil, Very Stupid

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.18, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Book, Reading, Doors, Bookshops

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

source: - "Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102". Interview with Thomas Frick, The Paris Review, Issue 106, www.theparisreview.org. Spring 1988.

Topics: Writing, Different, Firsts, First Person

Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.31, HarperCollins UK

Topics: People, Perspective, Needs

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

source: - "In their own words: literary giants who died this year" by Jess Sutcliffe, www.theguardian.com. December 28, 2013.

Topics: War, Worry, Let Me

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.

source: - "Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind By Communism" by Doris Lessing in "Our Country, Our Culture: The Politics of Political Correctness" edited by Edith Kurzweil and William Philips, 1994.

Topics: Dog, Attitude, Real, Wag The Dog, Desire For Power

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

source: - Doris Lessing, Doris May Lessing (1977). “A proper marriage”

Topics: Generations, Literature, Found

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: People, Cannibal, Golden Notebook

Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.

source: - Doris Lessing (2010). “Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5”, p.222, Vintage

Topics: Facts, Overlooked

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

source: - Doris May Lessing (1992). “Canopus in Argos: Archives”

Topics: People, Chinese, Body

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Happiness, Moving, Knowing, Golden Notebook

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

source: - "The Golden Notebook". Book by Doris Lessing, www.theguardian.com. 1962.

Topics: Attitude, Confused, Eye, Haze

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

Topics: World, Kind, Feels

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

Topics: Crime, Infant, Mere

... if you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies.

Topics: Dream, Fantasy, Ifs

For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being.

Topics: Running, Dark, Night

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

Topics: War, Distance, World, Time And Distance

The human community is evolving... . We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.

Topics: Running, Thinking, Long

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

Topics: Remember

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

Topics: Women, Love Is, Literature

I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

Topics: Block, Mean, Essence, Golden Notebook

We, as a society, can't tolerate very much difference.

Topics: Differences, Tolerate, Uniqueness

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

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Wise, Years, Etc, Cannibal

Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.

Topics: Memories, Sleep, Dark, No Sleep

I was in New York when Clinton was elected the first time, and everyone I knew was in a state of mad euphoria. I wondered what had happened to my hard-headed friends? Almost everyone I knew was drunk on this great white hope. The next time I was in New York, no one had a good word to say about Clinton, but everyone was in love with Hillary. She was the last word. It's all so unreal. Of course, it's no different in England. Here everyone was besotted with Tony Blair. He was a new face. Do people never learn?

source: - Interview with Jonah Raskin, progressive.org. June 1999.

Topics: New York, White, People, New Faces

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

Topics: Mean, Vertigo, Words Mean Nothing

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along.

source: - Interview with Jonah Raskin, progressive.org. November 19, 2013.

Topics: Thinking, Watches, Phases

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Truth, Stupid, Fighting, Accepting The Truth, Golden Notebook

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

Topics: Falling In Love, Fall, Ideas

I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?

source: - Source: progressive.org

Topics: Hate, Journey, Life Journey

We always seem to be surprised by events, especially by catastrophes, but also by wonderful events. Look at 1990, the year that the Soviet Union collapsed and apartheid in South Africa collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. I don't know anyone who foresaw those events. It seems to me that as a species we are constantly trying to adapt ourselves to the unexpected. In the meantime, we talk as if we are in control, and we're not. This seems to me to be the truth about the twentieth century.

source: - Source: progressive.org

Topics: Wall, Trying, Unexpected, Berlin Wall

It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1983). “Documents relating to the sentimental agents in the Volyen Empire”, Alfred A. Knopf

Topics: Believe, Duration, Empires

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

source: - The Golden Notebook "Free Women: 5" (1962)

Topics: Inspirational, Real, Sin, Golden Notebook

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

source: - Doris Lessing (2014). “African Stories”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Men, Giving, Landscape, Small Creatures

We are all creatures of the stars.

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1)”, p.66, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Stars, Creatures

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “On Cats”, p.16, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Dream, People, Age

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

Topics: Superstitions, Worst, Tolerable

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

source: - Doris Lessing (2013). “Under My Skin”, p.18, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Memories, Women

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

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “Under my skin”

Topics: Dream, Warning, Information

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.

Topics: Dream, Artist, Nightmare, Dreams And Nightmares

The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Sex, Writing, Difficulty, Difficulty Of Writing

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (2013). “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside”, p.6, Harper Collins

Topics: Eye, People, Judging

What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Life, Phases, Terrible

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

Topics: Book, Writing, Criticism, Department, Libel

But 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 very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Power, People, Dying

This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.

Topics: Song, Joy, Shapes, Reversal

Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

Topics: Men, Chance

Small things amuse small minds.

source: - Doris Lessing (2010). “Stories”, p.373, Vintage

Topics: Funny, Mind, Small Things, Small Minds, Little Minds

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.26, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Men, Anna, Said, Golden Notebook

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

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “The Four-Gated City”, p.12, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Mean, Self, Towns, Living In A Small Town

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.

source: - "Doris Lessing: being a woman writer". Undated profile at the BBC World Service, www.bbc.co.uk.

Topics: Notebook, Country, People, Golden Notebook

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

Topics: Common Sense, Feminist, Hated

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

source: - "Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism and 'Space Fiction'" by Lesley Hazelton, archive.nytimes.com. July 25, 1982.

Topics: Feminist, Want, Bears

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Philosophy, Should Have, Quality, Golden Notebook

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

Topics: Beautiful, Believe, Impossible

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

source: - Doris May Lessing (1989). “The Doris Lessing Reader”, Jonathan Cape

Topics: Forgiveness, Forgiving, Ifs

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “This Was the Old Chief’s Country: Collected African Stories Volume One”, p.6, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Running, Morning, Eye, Dramatic Change

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

source: - Doris Lessing (1985). “The Good Terrorist”, Vintage

Topics: Running, People, World

You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.

Topics: Real, Air, Feelings, Real Feelings

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

Topics: Black And White, Simple, Black White, Black And White Photography

Laughter is by definition healthy.

source: - "The Summer Before the Dark". Book by Doris Lessing, 1973.

Topics: Life, Laughter, Healing

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

source: - "September 11 wasn't that bad, says Nobel winner Lessing" by Haroon Siddique, www.theguardian.com. October 23, 2007.

Topics: Hate, Government, Iran, Evil Government

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

source: - 'The Martha Quest' (1952) pt. 4, ch. 1

Topics: Months, October, Unendurable

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

Topics: Mother, Strokes, Seventies, Mother Died

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

Topics: Winning, Giving, Lovely

People don't mind immoral messages. They don't mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex's sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can't stand is to be told it all doesn't matter, they can't stand formlessness.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Art, Sex, Love Is, Good Sex

There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.

Topics: Children, School, Thinking

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1)”, p.40, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Mutual Help, Mind, Different

Better Counsel comes overnight.

One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.

Topics: Insecure, Accepting, Uncertain

The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

Topics: Labels, Term, Critics

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (1999). “Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher”, p.30, Canongate Books

Topics: Wicked, Events, Ecclesiastes

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

Topics: Dream, Parent, Use, Recurring, Recurring Dreams

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.

source: - 'Particularly Cats' (1967) ch. 9

Topics: Giving, Grace, Roles, Spendthrift

I never stopped reading.

Topics: Reading

Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Arrogant, Anna, Insisting

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (1999). “Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher”, p.34, Canongate Books

Topics: Bible, Kings, Air, Ecclesiastes

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

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Stretching, I Can

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

Topics: Long Ago, New Start, Littles

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

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “Under my skin”

Topics: Children, Delight, Ability

But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.

Topics: Children, Spring, Interesting

The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1996). “Putting questions differently: interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994”

Topics: Dark, Views, White

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.

Topics: Morning, Men, White Man

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

Topics: Book, Reading, Week, Immediacy

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

Topics: Writing, Unhappy

What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.

source: - "The great contrarian". Interview with Lisa Allardice, www.theguardian.com. January 20, 2007.

Topics: People, Feminist, World

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

Topics: Character, Thinking, Feminist

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (1999). “Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher”, p.31, Canongate Books

Topics: Taken, Son, Men

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.

Topics: Summer, Garden, Eggplant, Manure, Foliage

Cats mean kittens, plentiful and frequent.

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “On Cats”, p.9, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Mean, Cat, Kitten, Plentiful

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

Topics: Mother, Rights, People, Valuable Lessons

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

source: - "'I have nothing in common with feminists. They never seem to think that one might enjoy men'". Interview with Barbara Ellen, www.theguardian.com. September 9, 2001.

Topics: Girl, Growing Up, Boys

There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Women, Past, Lines

You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1996). “Putting questions differently: interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994”

Topics: Men, Self, Female

You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes.

Topics: Drama, Taken, Eye, Improbability, New Eyes

The first casualty in any war is the truth. In World War II, I was part of a group of people who used to meet once a week with the sole purpose of analyzing the news and trying to work out what we weren't being told. We thought that we were clever, but we had absolutely no idea what was really going on. It was only years later that we learned the true story.

source: - Source: progressive.org

Topics: Clever, War, People

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

source: - "September 11 wasn't that bad, says Nobel winner Lessing" by Haroon Siddique, www.theguardian.com. October 23, 2007.

Topics: Blair, Hated

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

Topics: Capacity

I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains

Topics: Lying, Blood, Two, Looking Down

An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

Topics: Autobiography, Interim, Reports

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (1979). “Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5 : Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor (George Sherban) Emissary (grade 9) 87th of the Period of the Last Days”

Topics: Dialect, Development, Association

[On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable?

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “Under my skin”

Topics: Girl, Mother, Growing Up, Emigration

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

Topics: Motivational, Men, Long, Golden Notebook

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

source: - Doris Lessing (2013). “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside”, p.5, Harper Collins

Topics: Practice, Knows, Ifs

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

Topics: Mother, War, Writing, Messed Up

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

source: - Doris May Lessing (1979). “Shikasta: re, colonised planet 5 : personal, psychological, historical documents relating to visit by Johor (George Sherban) emissary (grade 9) 87th of the period of the last days”, Knopf

Topics: Giving, Profit, Exploitation

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

Topics: Love Is, Littles, Sometimes, Cosy

Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.

Topics: Cat, Owl, Paws

In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

Topics: War, Past, People, Sentimentality

All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.

source: - "If you don't succeed as a writer, be glad" by Lindesay Irvine, www.theguardian.com. May 12, 2008.

Topics: Giving, Interviews, Spend Time

My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.

source: - Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.13, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Book, Shapes, Way

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.

source: - Doris May Lessing (1994). “Under my skin”

Topics: Distance, Writing, People

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.

Topics: Beautiful, Taken, Years, Dustbin

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.

source: - "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Thinking, Giving, Nobel

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.

source: - "Mrs. Lessing Addresses Some of Life's Puzzles". Interview with Herbert Mitgang, archive.nytimes.com. April 22, 1984.

Topics: Dream, Sleep, Writing, Writing Process

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.

Topics: Home, Cat, Yellow, Enchanting, Tiny Things

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.

source: - Doris Lessing (1973). “The Grass is Singing”, p.66, Heinemann

Topics: Men, Feelings, Complaining