Doris Lessing Quotes

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

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

Yes. Laugh. But there's sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.' He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. 'What position?' - I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments. ~ Doris Lessing

We try to have things both ways. We've always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn't treat us by rule? ~ Doris Lessing

I suddenly saw her quite differently. I saw that she was a person. Not my mother. She had thought it all out. She had wanted to commit suicide. She would never commit suicide. On that night I grew up. Or so I would like to believe. ~ Doris Lessing

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. 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. ~ Doris Lessing

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

I never stopped reading. ~ Doris Lessing

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

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. ~ Doris Lessing

What you don't understand is, people never believe these things. Not until they experience them. Then when they experience them they become people other people don't believe. Hard lines. ~ Doris Lessing

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

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

If you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies. ~ Doris Lessing

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

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility. ~ Doris Lessing

On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn't discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East. ~ Doris Lessing

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. ~ Doris Lessing

Education means only this- that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education. ~ Doris Lessing

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

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months. ~ Doris Lessing

they seem unable to retain this very simple truth for long, although they have been told again and again, and this is because of another and most powerful feature of their thinking, which is that anything they are told is distorted to fit their own particular personal or group bias and then added, like another pebble to the pile of the half-truths they already cherish. ~ Doris Lessing

I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life. ~ Doris Lessing

I'm not sure that finding a husband at university made me any less of a feminist or an academic. I still soaked up Susan Faludi; I still read Doris Lessing. But I did it at the same time I met someone who I felt was my soulmate. ~ Janine Di Giovanni

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

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. ~ Doris Lessing

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size. ~ Doris Lessing

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

Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down-even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written-and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this-are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught-you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow you own intuitive feeling about what you need; that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people. ~ Doris Lessing

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

So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality, into which war-like events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains. Events and the life in which they are embedded have the same quality. But since it is not possible that events are not part of the life they occur in
it is not possible that a bomb should explode into a texture of life foreign to it
all that means is that one has not understood, one has not been watching. ~ Doris Lessing

There are people in the world all the time who know" the professor said. "But they keep quiet. They just move about quietly, saving the people who know they are in the trap. And then, for the ones who have got out, it's like coming around from chloroform. They realize that all their lives they've been asleep and dreaming. And then it's their turn to learn the rules and the timing. And they become the ones to live quietly in the world, just as human beings might if there were only a few human beings on a planet that had monkeys on it for inhabitants ... ~ Doris Lessing

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

We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I ~ Doris Lessing

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

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. ~ Doris Lessing

But far within him something cried For the great tragedy to start, The pang in lingering mercy fall And sorrow break upon his heart. - EDWIN MUIR ~ Doris Lessing

Long ago I decided that at a political meeting the truth usually comes out in just such a speech or a remark ignored at the time because its tone is not that of the meeting. Humorous, or satirical, or even angry or bitter - yet it's the truth, and all the long speeches and contributions are nonsense. ~ Doris Lessing

I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others. ~ Doris Lessing

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

Writers do not come out of houses without books. ~ Doris Lessing

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

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

We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter. ~ Doris Lessing

I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle. ~ Doris Lessing

Martha Quest, who thought of herself as so adventurous, so free and unbounded - the fact was, even the idea of picking up a telephone and making herself known to a new person troubled her: she made excuses, she could not do it. ~ Doris Lessing

As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical - a man wouldn't use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to, was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her. She felt that without knowing it or being conscious of it (though perhaps he was conscious of it) he was afraid of the emotion. A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalized sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm and that is when a man, from the whole of his need and desire takes a woman and wants all her response. Everything else is a substitute and a fake, and the most inexperienced woman feels this instinctively. ~ Doris Lessing

It's a fact that men of all nations are convinced that men of any other nation are no good for women. I'm sure a statistically significant number of women would be able to vouch for this.
And listen how you talk. You are bitter already. When I hear a woman use words like statistics, I know she is bitter. ~ 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

Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly. ~ Doris Lessing

After all, this situation, a similar one, is bound to roll around again, in a different context, a different history. Everything does. And the next time, will we (humankind) recognise it and do better? ~ Doris Lessing

The system of economic production depended on the consumption of every conceivable kind of goods by everyone - consumption of entirely unnecessary objects, food, drink, clothes, gadgets, devices. Every person in the Northwest Fringes - as in the Isolated Northern Continent - was subjected, every moment of every day, through propaganda methods more powerful than any ever known before, to the need to buy, consume, waste, destroy, throw away - and this at a time when the globe as a whole was already short of goods of every kind and the majority of Shikasta's people starved and went without. ~ Doris Lessing

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

Yes, my child, you must read. You must read everything that comes your way. It doesn't matter what you read at first, later you'll learn discrimination. Schools are no good, Matty, you learn nothing at school. If you want to be anything, you must educate yourself. ~ Doris Lessing

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. ~ Doris Lessing

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

It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides. ~ Doris Lessing

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is. ~ Doris Lessing

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

Better Counsel comes overnight. ~ Doris Lessing

I have you for being normal, I hate you for it. You're a normal human being. What right have you to that? ~ Doris Lessing

When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires. ~ Doris Lessing

[ ... ] 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

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

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. ~ Doris Lessing

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better. ~ Doris Lessing

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it. ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

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. ~ Doris Lessing

Please don't be alarmed, you'd be surprised how many charming people are walking our streets, the mere ghosts of themselves. ~ Doris Lessing

I have been thinking for some time of writing a piece called: In Pursuit of the Working-Class. My life has been spent in pursuit. So has everyone's, of course. I chase love and fame all the time. I have chased, off and on, and with much greater deviousness of approach, the working-class and the English. The pursuit of the working-class is shared by everyone with the faintest tint of social responsibility: some of the most indefatigable pursuers are working-class people. That is because the phrase does n ~ Doris Lessing

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

Oh, I simply can't think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is ~ Doris Lessing

Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world. ~ Doris Lessing

This is because Marxism looks at things as a whole and in relation to each other - or tries to, but its limitations are not the point for the moment. A person who has been influenced by Marxism takes it for granted that an event in Siberia will affect one in Botswana. I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time [written in 1971], outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects and creeds. But it was an attempt. ~ Doris Lessing

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. ~ Doris Lessing

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. ~ Doris Lessing

Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work ... ~ Doris Lessing

Similarly, when Mr Quest complained about the international ring of Jews who controlled the world (which he had taken to doing lately, after reading some pamphlet sent to him through the post), Martha argued against him, in the most reasonable and logical manner; for one does not learn so young that against some things reason is powerless. And when Mrs Quest said that all the kaffirs were dirty and lazy and inherently stupid, she defended them. ~ Doris Lessing

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

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning. ~ Doris Lessing

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

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge. ~ Doris Lessing

We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always. ~ Doris Lessing

You're suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it. ~ Doris Lessing

We are all regularly presented, day after day, with bad news, the worst, and I think our minds are more and more set into attitudes of foreboding and depression. But is it possible that all the bad things going on – and I don't have to list them, for we all know what they are – are a reaction, a dragging undertow, to a forward movement in the human social evolution that we can't easily see? Perhaps, looking back, let's say in a century or two centuries, is it possible people will say, 'That was a time when extremes battled for supremacy. The human mind was developing very fast in the direction of self-knowledge, self-command, and as always happens, as always has to happen, this thrust forward aroused its opposite, the forces of stupidity, brutality, mob thinking'? I think it is possible. I think that this is what is happening. ~ Doris Lessing

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. ~ Doris Lessing

I haven't got the energy to write now. ~ Doris Lessing

She could not bear to lie in bed and wait, so she pestered the nurse until she could sit on a veranda, screened by a thick curtain of golden shower from the street, because she could assure herself she was not blind by looking through her glowing eyelids at the light from the sky. She sat there all day, and felt the waves of heat and perfume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But nostalgia for what? ~ Doris Lessing

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared. ~ Doris Lessing

I am your original autodidact. ~ Doris Lessing

...Ben, but Teresa too, must be feeling oppressed by the rich clever world where people could leap off into air under umbrellas and feel safe, because their lives had always been safe. ~ Doris Lessing

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

The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. ~ Doris Lessing

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 every 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.
It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only ... or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences ... ~ Doris Lessing

Listen Anna, if we don't believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there's no hope for us. We're going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas. ~ Doris Lessing

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. ~ Doris Lessing