Top 367 Quotes & Sayings by Doris Lessing
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Doris Lessing.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
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.
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
Literature is analysis after the event.
Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.
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.
I'm just a story teller.
The human race has been telling stories since it began.
Pearls mean tears.
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.
What is a hero without love for mankind.
Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
Small things amuse small minds.
You know, 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.
I have ideas that I will probably never write now.
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
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.
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
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.
I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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.
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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.
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.
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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.
I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.
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.
Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
My father was in the First World War.
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.
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