Doris May Lessing Quotes & Sayings

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 difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed. — 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

What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it. — 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

The kitten was six weeks old. It was enchanting, a delicate fairy-tale cat, whose Siamese genes showed in the shape of the face, ears, tail, and the subtle lines of its body. [ ... ] She sat, a tiny thing, in the middle of a yellow carpet, surrounded by five worshipppers, not at all afraid of us. Then she stalked around that floor of the house, inspecting every inch of it, climbed up on to my bed, crept under the fold of a sheet, and was at home. — Doris Lessing

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

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

When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip. — Doris Lessing

For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world's great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth has reeled under blows from comets, has lost or captured moons, has changed its air, its very nature. No one knows what has existed and has vanished beyond recovery, evidence for the number of times man has understood and has forgotten again that his mind and flesh and life and movements are made of star stuff, sun stuff, planet stuff; that the sun's being is his, and what sort of events may be expected, because of the meshings of the planets - and how an intelligent husbanding of humanity's resources may be effected based on the most skilled and sensitive of forecasting, by those whose minds are instruments to record the celestial dance. — Doris Lessing

For many thousands of years people had looked at expensive heads of hair and thought of how much food and warmth they represented, so obviously it was a thought of no use at all, so why bother to have it? But thoughts of this sort did go ticking on, useless or not. — Doris Lessing

It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing - I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do something one wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the 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, It would be very bad i I said, out of guilt or something: I loved Janet's father, when i know quite well I didn't. Or for your mother to say: I loved Richard. Or I'm doing work I love ... — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And — Doris Lessing

It's very interesting what you don't care about. — 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

I would not be at all surprised to find out ... personal feelings about our situation in time, seldom in accordance with fact, so that we are always taken by surprise by 'ageing', may be an indication of a different lifespan, in the past - but that this past, in biological terms, is quite recent, and so we have not come to terms with it psychologically. — Doris Lessing

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

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time. — Doris Lessing

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

When there's a war, people get married. — Doris Lessing

A Nasrudin 'joke' may at first seem unfunny, or pointless, but will after study change and begin to reveal itself: you have uncovered the first level of meaning, and will soon observe your thought patterns shift as you watch them; you will have made the first crack in the wall of assumptions, the conditioned thinking (designated 'The Old Villain') which imprisons each and every one of us, the worst of which is to think that the visible world is all there is, that a man's or a mouse's view of life is the true one. — Doris Lessing

This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes. — 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

It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later. — Doris Lessing

Y'know, there's a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything's cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don't believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, 'Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time'. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, 'We know that what we're doing is wrong. — Doris Lessing

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

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

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible. — Doris Lessing

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then - we went on dancing. — Doris Lessing

And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of 'personality'. Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the 'personality' doesn't exist any more. It's the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We're told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I've even been believing it. — Doris Lessing

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all. — Doris Lessing

While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot held an infant or a small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a body... then something like a stick insect, enormous bulging eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbs... a small girl all blurred, her flesh guttering and melting - a doll with chalky swollen limbs, its eyes wide and blank, like blue ponds, and its mouth open, showing a swollen little tongue. A lanky boy was skewed, one half of his body sliding from the other. A child seemed at first glance normal, but then Harriet saw there was no back to its head; it was all face, which seemed to scream at her. — Doris Lessing

A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc? — Doris Lessing

We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our hearts in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in each other's face like snowballs, or cricket balls (How's that?) or, more accurately, like great bleeding wounds: 'Take my wound. — Doris Lessing

If you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand. — Doris Lessing

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

It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I've seen it over and over again. If — Doris Lessing

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal. — Doris Lessing

Your fascinating admirer waits here for you,' said Donovan, indicating a vacant and grass-grown lot at the corner. 'Yes, Matty dear, when you've gone to your virgin bed, he sits here, in his car, watching your room to make sure of your exclusive interest in him - the whole town's laughing its head off about it,' he added cruelly, and glanced swiftly sideways to see how she would take it. — Doris Lessing

When she was older, after ten or so, she could tell she was being useful, but as a small child she was tolerated (only just, she knew) by this whirlwind of efficiency that was her mother organizing a party. Still she insisted on arranging fruit on a dish, or disposing ashtrays around the house, while her mother reduced her pace to Alice's. At least while "helping," Alice did not feel quite so much as if she were a tiny creature on top of a great wave, frantically and hopelessly signalling to her mother, who stood indifferently on the shore, not noticing her. — Doris Lessing

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it. — Doris Lessing

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. — Doris Lessing

I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring. — Doris Lessing

There are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other. — Doris Lessing

We, as a society, can't tolerate very much difference. — Doris Lessing