Top 367 Quotes & Sayings by Doris Lessing - Page 3

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.

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

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

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

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

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

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

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.

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

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

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.

For there is never any way to go but in.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Women are slaves to their beauty.

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.

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.

Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.

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.

Intelligence forbids tears.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

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.

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.

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."

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

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

What matters most is that we learn from living.

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

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.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.

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.

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.

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.