Doris Lessing Quotes

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

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

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

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

What's terrible is to pretend that 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.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

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

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

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

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

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

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

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.

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

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

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

Small things amuse small minds.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

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

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

The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

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

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

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

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.

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

Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.

I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.

So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

What matters most is that we learn from living.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.