Famous Quotes by Doris Lessing

  • What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect... More
  • It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough... More
  • War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ...... More
  • So that this beautiful realm of hers was held in her mind extended, or lengthened: it had been... More
  • Anyone could lick a child all over as if it were a puppy or a kitten—but where had that thought... More
  • I did not lose my Sirian perspectives, the Sirian scope of time and space. But I was inside, too,... More
  • But it isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes... More
  • The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of... More
  • There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the... More
  • Women of the tradition to which Alice and Martha belonged are prepared to discuss menstruation or... More
  • We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed. More
  • Children can’t be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that... More
  • For my father, who used to sit, hour after hour, night after night, outside our house in Africa,... More
  • We looked down at a glassy glittering icy place many days walking across and very deep, between... More
  • When a generation watches the young ones, their future, their responsibility, grow up, and when... More
  • In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up... More
  • This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are... More
  • Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented... More
  • Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time. More
  • You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that... More
  • There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books... More
  • All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of... More
  • This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to sudden reversals, upheavals, changes,... More
  • It was almost with the feeling of a rider who was wondering whether his horse would make the... More
  • And so she knelt in front of a bookcase, in driving need of the right arrangement of words; for... More
  • There arose, glimmering whitely over the harsh scrub and the stunted trees, a noble city, set... More
  • She was watching, fearfully, the effect on herself of the poetry of suffering; the words “no... More
  • “I suppose with the French Revolution for a father and the Russian Revolution for a mother, you... More
  • You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very... More
  • If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of... More
  • What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her... More
  • You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly... More
  • What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their... More
  • Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so... More
  • Literature is analysis after the event. More
  • What a phenomenon it has been—science fiction, space fiction—exploding out of nowhere,... More
  • You can’t be a Red if you’re married to a civil servant. More
  • The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or... More
  • Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again... More
  • And when the festival was over, that was the end of it all. And I do not think I am being... More
  • Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: without the sting of otherness,... More
  • Yes, but what are all these guises, aspects presentations? Only manifestations of what we all are... More
  • This is certainly not the place for a discourse about what festivals are for. Discussions on this... More
  • There was a continuous movement now, from Zone Five to Zone Four. And from Zone Four to Zone... More
  • The true novel wrestles on the edge of understanding, lying about on all sides desperately, for... More
  • Now I must write personally; but I would not, if I didn’t know that nothing we can say about... More
  • The centuries-long wars with the Saracen, when everything of the East was the enemy, and the... More
  • It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other... More
  • When old settlers say “One has to understand the country,” what they mean is, “You have to... More
  • But what these had been, our peoples, our selves—were with us then, were us, had become... More
  • We are all of us made by war, twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it. A war does not... More

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