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Doris Lessing Quotes | Quotes said by Doris Lessing

  • Doris Lessing Quote #1

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


  • Doris Lessing Quote #2

    [...] students should be told that an effort is always required, when you start to read a serious author, to overcome mental laziness and reluctance, because you are about to enter the mind of someone who thinks differently from yourself. And that is the whole point and the only point: the literary treasure-house has many mansions.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #3

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

  • Doris Lessing Quote #4

    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 the flesh.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #5

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

  • Doris Lessing Quote #6

    As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave—that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, here idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed—yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #7

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

  • Doris Lessing Quote #8

    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 Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

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

  • Doris Lessing Quote #12

    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.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #13

    Her ears, lightly fringed with white that looked silver, lifted and moved, back, forward, listening and sensing. Her face turned, slightly, after each new sensation, alert. Her tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her other organs could not. She sat poised, air-light, looking, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, with all of her, fur, whiskers, ears -- everything, in delicate vibration.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #14

    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. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #15

    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 Quote #16

    I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

    I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, 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.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #19

    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

  • Doris Lessing Quote #20

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

  • Doris Lessing Quote #21

    I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade.

    (So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if ...)

  • Doris Lessing Quote #22

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

  • Doris Lessing Quote #23

    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.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #24

    In the end, the cats were rounded up and put into a room. My father went into the room with his First World War revolver, more reliable, he said, than a shotgun. The gun sounded again, again, again, again. The cats that were still uncaught had sensed their fate and were raging and screaming all over the bush, with people after them. My father came out of the room at one point, very white, with tight angry lips and wet eyes. He was sick.
    Then he swore a good deal, then he went back into the room and the shooting continued. At last he came out. The servants went in and carried off the corpses to the disused well. Some of the cats had escaped – three never came back at all to the murderous household, so they must have gone wild and taken their chances.
    When my mother returned from her trip, and the neighbour who had brought her had gone, she walked quiet and uncommenting through the house where there was now one cat, her old favourite, asleep on her bed. My mother had not asked for this cat to be spared, because it was old, and not very well. But she was looking for it; and she sat a long time stroking and talking to it. Then she came out to the verandah.
    There sat my father and there I sat, murderers, and feeling it. She sat down. He was rolling a cigarette. His hands were still shaking. He looked up at her and said: ‘That must never happen again.’ And I suppose it never did.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #25

    In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest, and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I am on my side, she crouches looking into my face. Soft, soft touches of her paw. I open my eyes, say I don't want to wake. I close my eyes. Cat gently pats my eyelids. Cat licks my nose. Cat starts purring, two inches from my face. Cat, then, as I lie pretending to be asleep, delicately bites my nose. I laugh and sit up. At which she bounds off my bed and streaks downstairs -- to have the back door opened if it is winter, to be fed, if it is summer.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #26

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

  • Doris Lessing Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

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

  • Doris Lessing Quote #29

    Kad je mene muškarac pogledao na taj osobit nacin, tim gorucim, optužujucim pogledom, s tom agresijom, tim tijelom koje šalje jednu jedinu jasnu poruku, ŽELIM TE, jesam li mu posvetila makar jednu sucutnu misao? Pa ipak, znala sam kako je ljubav nešto strašno, i nema isprike za mene. Fizicku privlacnost prati grozna drskost, i umjesto da je osudujemo, mi joj se cak divimo.

  • Doris Lessing Quote #30

    Las palabras aparecen en tu mente y allí bailan a ritmos de los que tú conscientemente nada sabes. Cabos y rabos de palabras: pueden ser una indicación de un estado de ánimo oculto. Pueden removerse o cantar durante días, enloqueciéndote. Pueden ser como película invisible, como pelicula adhesiva, entre tú y la realidad.

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