Doris Quotes & Sayings

We were determined by public opinions of us. Would we think we existed without outside confirmation? And how long would we live apart from others before we began to doubt our existence? — Doris Grumbach

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

Still, slander against the president and first lady continued to fill the columns of opposition papers. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

There's no magazine you open, unless its AARP, that shows a woman over the age of 45 in any other light, other than having to buy Depends or Viagra. — Doris Roberts

Men who wear turtlenecks look like turtles. — Doris Lilly

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

Of Teddy Roosevelt and his siblings, the author writes they were, armed with an innate curiosity and discipline fostered by his remarkable father. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

Let us choose life and love, and happily use our selves up in loving service to one another. — Doris Haddock

Doris Day started performing at a young age, had a tough road to success, and once she achieved it delivered the goods 100 percent and brilliantly, always making difficult work look as easy as breathing. — Robert Osborne

I don't know that I will ever make a political speech again." Would he care to qualify that statement? one reporter queried. "Yes," Roosevelt laughingly said. "I won't say never. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

To illustrate the marked atmospheric contrast between the two cities, the writer Frank Carpenter observed that in New York, "a streetcar will not wait for you if you are not just at its stopping point. It goes on and you must stand there until the next car comes along. In Washington people a block away signal the cars by waving their hands or their umbrellas. Then they walk to the car at a leisurely pace, while the drivers wait patiently and the horses rest." While the capital might lack "the spirit of intense energy" that animated New York, Carpenter concluded that Washington, with its broad, clean streets and fine marble buildings (and its shanties generally hidden from view), offered "the pleasanter place in which to live. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Elizabeth Blair of brother Frank: he could not let even a great man set his small dogs on him without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of the resentment. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

Wherever a tension needed the solvent of good-will, or friction the oil of benevolence; wherever suspicion needed the antidote of frankness, or wounded pride the disinfectant of a hearty laugh - there Taft was sent. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

After illuminating the work of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Louise Bourgeois, Balthus, and other modern artists, Mieke Bal again demonstrates her extraordinary flair for cultural criticism in taking on the work of Doris Salcedo, exploring the philosophical and aesthetic stakes of this committed political art and the relation between beauty, violence, and memory. A tour de force. — Jonathan Culler

You know, The Beach Boys' image is kinda like a group Doris Day, you know what I mean? — Bruce Johnston

I like sunny stories. You know, my favorite girls in the '50s were Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day, and Esther Williams. — Edward Herrmann

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

Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children. — Doris Day

My books are written with a strong chronological spine. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Five Life Standards of Voluntary Simplicity
Do Justice
Learn from the World Community
Nurture People
Cherish the Natural Order
Non-Conform Freely. — Doris Janzen Longacre

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

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

I'm not stingy. I'm just afraid of being an easy mark. People wouldn't have money long if they didn't ask how much things cost. — Doris Duke

It's a bully speech," encouraged Roosevelt in reply. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Having a book is somewhat like having a baby, as many woman writers have observed before me: the conception, the long preparation, the wait, the growing heaviness (not of body in this case but of the spirit and the manuscript) toward the end, the initial delight at the sight of the product, fully formed and seemingly perfect, and then the usual postpartum depression. What will people whose opinion I care about, and those whose views I don't value but have weight in the world of reader, think of it? — Doris Grumbach

Admiral Dahlgren's twenty-one-year-old son, Ulric, had lost a leg at Gettysburg. When he appeared at a Washington party, he was surrounded by pretty girls. They stayed by his side all night, refusing to dance, in tribute to the handsome colonel who had been known as an expert waltzer. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Those who knew Lincoln described him as an extraordinarily funny man. Humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

My paintings are so legible, I feel guilty. — Doris McCarthy

They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Through the last days of May and the early days of June, Eleanor — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

Every child has the capacity to be everything. — Doris Lessing

It is my belief ... that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes. — Doris Lessing

It is seldom that persons who enjoy intervals of public life are happy in their periods of seclusion. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town. — Doris Lessing

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary! — Doris Lessing

If it hasn't already done so, the church ... must recognize that it lives in a pagan society; it must seek for values and norms not shared by society. In short, it will either recover the Christian doctrine of nonconformity or cease to have any authentic Christian voice. — Doris Janzen Longacre

Whereas Taft discouraged the young Yale student from extracurricular reading, fearful it would detract from required courses, Roosevelt read widely yet managed to stand near the top of his class. The breath of his numerous interests allowed him to draw on knowledge across various disciplines, from zoology in philosophy and religion, from poetry and drama to history and politics. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

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

We demand that the government of Canada force Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris. Why do this, you may ask? Because it'll be fun. — Rick Mercer

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

Braden! How the hell are ya?!" said the guy with the teeth, grabbing Braden's hand and pumping it up and down almost frantically. He looked like a demented Ken doll.

"You're looking quite dashing tonight, Braden," said the cold-looking woman in an even colder voice. "Isn't he, Felicity?" she asked the sullen young woman. I had never seen a more inappropriately named person in my life. She would have made Wednesday Addams look like Doris Day. — N.M. Silber

Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

Arguing with a fool proves there are two. — Doris M. Smith

Republican Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had defied the machine to become governor by waging war on the railroads that ruled his state. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Modernizing the postal service was particularly important for the soldiers, who relied on letters, newspapers, and magazines from home to sustain morale. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

And what are we going to tell people?" exclaimed Doris. "That I'm old and crazy. That wouldn't be far off the mark," Alma replied. — Isabel Allende

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

There I go When my heart all worn by grief Sinketh low. Where my baseless hopes do lie There to find my peace, go I. Sad and slow . . — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that, — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power? — Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing. — Doris Humphrey

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

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

Why did people fall in love?he wondered as he watched Rock and Doris pretend to do just that. Obviously, it made people ridiculous and not just in movies from the sixties. There had to be some basis in real life or no one would ever have made a silly comedy about love. Yeah, there were also movies about love that weren't comedies, but in those movies people acted ridiculous for a while and then someone announced the were going to die, or they had to go off to war, or oops I forgot to mention my wife. People stopped acting ridiculous and starting acting really serious and sad, sad because the ridiculous part was over. How could people want this foolishness in their lives? — Marshall Thornton

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

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

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning. — 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

The 2012 payout will be the lowest in our history: well below 50 percent. — Ennio Doris

It's intoxicating for a man to be waited on. Combine this with very, very skillful sex, and that will get them. — Doris Lilly

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

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

There was no need to remind Roosevelt who controlled the senate. "I persistently refused to lose my temper," he recalled. "I merely explained good-humoredly that I had made up my mind." Though he steadfastly refused — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Now and then, living more with less means paying more money. It may mean buying better quality - leaving behind repetitive purchases of discount junk for one expensive, well-made, thoughtfully designed tool that will last. — Doris Janzen Longacre

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

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

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

But unlike the "electric" excitement that had filled the room four years earlier, when Nellie had sparkled with happiness and Taft had "laughed with the joy of a boy," both the president and first lady clearly understood that the divisive convention had rendered Republican chances for election in November almost impossible. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Some people obtain fame, others deserve 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

Well I do find the beauty in animals. I find beauty everywhere. I find beauty in my garden. — Doris Day

My last picture for Warners was Romance on the High Seas. It was Doris Day's first picture; that was before she became a virgin. — Oscar Levant

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

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

Better to have your enemies inside your tent pissing out, then to have them outside your tent pissing in. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

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

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

Still, Roosevelt noted, it was "not always easy to strike the just middle," and he inevitably made mistakes. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

On the morning of June 20, at a hastily arranged conference at New York's Gramercy Park Hotel, a new umbrella organization was born with Eleanor as honorary chair - the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children. The purpose of the new committee was to coordinate all the different agencies and resources available in the United States for the care of refugee children. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Walt Whitman, who worked as a nurse in the hospital wards, that the harrowing experience made one's "little cares and difficulties" disappear "into nothing. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties. — Doris Kearns Goodwin