Doris Lessing Quotes

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.

My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.

All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.

None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.

Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.

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

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

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

Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.

One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.

Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

Women are slaves to their beauty.

We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

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.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

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.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.

You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.

Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

A story is how we construct our experiences.

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

We are all creatures of the stars.

What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.

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.

I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?

The human community is evolving... . We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.

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

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.