Doris Lessing Quotes & Sayings

People who lack economic and social power often expand their physical impact on the world."
"-In Pursuit of Silence — Doris Lessing

The thing is, I haven't changed at all. — Doris Lessing

Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself. — Doris Lessing

I am always amazed, in myself and in other women, at the strength of our need to bolster men up. This is ironical, living as we do in a time of men's criticizing us for being 'castrating', etc., - all the other words and phrases of the same kind. (Nelson says his wife is 'castrating' - this makes me angry, thinking of the misery she must have lived through.) For the truth is, women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. Molly for instance. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create men. — Doris Lessing

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. — Doris Lessing

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

We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate. But when the Gods explode, or err, or dissolve into flying clouds of gas, or shrink, or expand, or whatever else their fates might demand, then the minuscule items of their substance may in their small ways express - not protest, which of course is inappropriate to their station in life - but an acknowledgement of the existence of irony: yes, they may sometimes allow themselves - always with respect - the mildest possible grimace of irony. — Doris Lessing

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

The truth was, she was becoming more and more uncomfortably conscious not only that the things she said, and a good many of the things she thought, had been taken down off a rack and put on, but that what she really felt was something else again. — 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

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

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. — Doris Lessing

But after all, to kind of like people, doc, puts you in a pretty privileged class for a start
so few citizens can afford to really kinda like people. — 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

It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living. — Doris Lessing

You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering. — Doris Lessing

There is only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best — Doris Lessing

What is happening is something new in my life. I think many people have a sense of shape, of unfolding, in their lives. This sense makes it possible for them to say: Yes, this new person is important to me: he, or she, is the beginning of something I must live through. Or: This emotion, which I have not felt before, is not the alien I believed it to be. It will now be part of me and I must deal with it.
It is easy now, looking back over my life to say: That Anna, in that time, was such and such a person. And then, five years later, she was such and such. A year, two years, five years of a certain kind of being can be rolled up and tucked away, or 'named' - yes, during that time I was like that. Well now I am in the middle of such a period, and when it is over I shall glance back at it casually and say: Yes, that's what I was. — Doris Lessing

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

She was well armed with facts from The New Statesman, She was even better armed by the conviction of being in the right, but what is the use of being right if one is faced by the blank, unaltered stare of satisfied ignorance? Martha was so new to the game that she was surprised by Mrs. Buss's calm remark, "Oh, well, everyone's entitled to their ideas." She said it was not a question of ideas, but one of fact. — Doris Lessing

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

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

Arthur Deikman's prime and particular contribution, apart from drawing attention to the problem, was to point out how much cultish behaviour goes on unrecognised, in, for instance, business life or in apparently harmless organisations, religious or philanthropic. It is useful to ask oneself the question: do I feel superior because I belong to - whatever it is? Do I look down on people outside? Perhaps the most easily seen feature of a cult s that: WE are better than THEM. It is salutary to recognise how often in a day we feel disapproval or superiority, matching ourselves with 'outsiders' ... — Doris Lessing

Now, I am not Anna, I have no will, I can't move out of a situation once it has started, I just go along with it. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

it seemed to her that she had acquired not virtues but a form of dementia — Doris Lessing

She put that book down and picked up Ellis. Now, it is hardly possible to be bored by a book on sex when one is fifteen, but she was restless because this collection of interesting facts seemed to have so little to do with her own problems. — Doris Lessing

But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles. — Doris Lessing

What matters most is that we learn from living. — Doris Lessing

But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi's, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself. — Doris Lessing

Choose? When do I ever choose? Have I ever chosen? — Doris Lessing

It's a hard case,' said Paul. 'First, I'm twenty. That means I'm very nervous and ill-at-ease with women. Second, I'm twenty. I have all my life before me, and frankly the prospect often appals me. Thirdly, I'm twenty, and I'm in love with Anna and my heart is breaking. — 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

My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother. — 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

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

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares ... — Doris Lessing

Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness. — Doris Lessing

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way. — Doris Lessing

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital. — Doris Lessing

It is not too much to say that when the word "blood" is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement. — Doris Lessing

We are being punished, that's all." "What for?" he demanded, already on guard because there was a tone in her voice he hated. "For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would be. — Doris Lessing

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story. — Doris Lessing

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 ... You, running about playing at revolutions, playing little games, thinking you're important. You're just peasants, you'll never *do* anything. — Doris Lessing

Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born - and yet in each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from his low half-animal state to true humanity. Each one of them with this potential, and yet so few can be reached, to make the leap. — Doris Lessing

The novel had a framework made by thinking. The thought was that to divide off and compartmentalize living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble. Old, young; black, white; men, women; capitalism, socialism; these dichotomies undo us, force us into unreal categorisation, make us look for what separates us rather than what we have in common. That was the thought, which made the shape or pattern of 'The Golden Notebook'. But the emotions were stronger than the thought. This is why I have always seen TGN as a failure: a failure in my terms, of what I had meant. For has this book changed by an iota our tendency to think like computers set to sort everything - people, ideas, history - into boxes? No, it has not. Yet why should I have such a hubristic thought? But I was in the grip of discovery, of revelation. I had only just seen this Truth: I was watching my own mind working like a sorting machine, and I was appalled. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

She brought herself to decide she would make an effort to renew that friendship with the Cohens, for there was no one else who could help her. She wanted them to tell her what she must read. For there are two ways of reading: one of them deepens and intensifies what one already knows; from the other, one takes new facts, new views to weave into one's life. She was saturated with the first, and needed the second. All those books she had borrowed, two years before - she had read them, oh yes; but she had not been ready to receive them. — Doris Lessing

As always he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul. — Doris Lessing

The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau - but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible. — Doris Lessing

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. — 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

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. — 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 was realizing something I should have known by using my intelligence, without ever having gone to their flat at all: that the ties between Nelson and his wife are bitterly close, and never to be broken in their lives. They are tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving; the experience of pain dealt and received; pain as an aspect of love; apprehended as a knowledge of what the world is, what growth is.
Nelson is about to leave his wife; he will never leave her. She will wail at being rejected and abandoned; she does not know she will never be rejected. — Doris Lessing

I never stopped reading. — Doris Lessing

For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over. — 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

The prisoners were handcuffed together, and it was these hands that caught Martha's attention: the working hands, clasped together by broad and gleaming steel, held carefully at waist level, steady against the natural movement of swinging arms - the tender dark flesh cautious against the bite of the metal. These people were being taken to the magistrate for being caught at night after curfew, or forgetting to carry one of the passes which were obligatory, or - but there were a dozen reasons, each as flimsy. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

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

My sense of urgency is very simple,' said the professor, 'I've remembered that much. It's because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that's what anxiety is, in a lot of people. They know they have to do something, they should be doing something else, not just living hand-to-mouth, putting paint on their faces and decorating their caves and playing nasty tricks on their rivals. No. They have to do something else before they die - and so the mental hospitals are full and the chemists flourishing. — Doris Lessing

If someone cracks up, what does that mean? At what point does a person about to fall to pieces say: I'm cracking up? And if I were to crack up, what form would it take? — 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

A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man. — Doris Lessing

Victim-eyes of impersonal tragedy, to be impersonal no longer. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education. — Doris Lessing

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

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

I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done. — 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

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

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

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now
where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

Literature is analysis after the event. — Doris Lessing

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

A writer is the conscience of the world. — Doris Lessing

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies. — Doris Lessing

You can only value something if you've experienced it. — Doris Lessing

And form this kind of thought has emerged a new conclusion: which is that it is not only childish of a writer to want readers to see what he sees, to understand the shape and aim of a novel as he sees it - his wanting this means that he has not understood a most fundamental point. Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn't anything more to be got out of it. — Doris Lessing

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we'll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind. — Doris Lessing

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals. — 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

Of course it may be argued that this is a fairly bleak view of life. It means, for instance, that we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become your enemies-will, as it were, throw stones through your window. It means that if you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community's ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evil-doer. This is an absolutely automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically.
But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack. — Doris Lessing

Standardisation of intellectual and emotional patterns had become extreme. A main mechanism for achieving this was a device that supplied identical indoctrinational material simultaneously into every living or working unit, whether that of a single person, a family, or an institution, through a whole country. These programmes were standardised, particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic - kindness to animals, for instance - but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition. — Doris Lessing

Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money. — 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

You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature. — Doris Lessing

Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers. — Doris Lessing

When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

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 ... — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing