Doris Lessing Quotes

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

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

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.

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

Better Counsel comes overnight.

Borrowing is not much better than begging;

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

Laughter is by definition healthy.

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

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

Pearls mean tears.

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

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

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade.

They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They're always eating out, and when they're at home they don't cook the way they did ten years ago. They're all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by.

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates.

It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.

We are several people fitted inside each other.

Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.

This world is run by people who know how to do things.

They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.

The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself.

You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists.

My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.

You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes.

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.

Men are unwise and curiously planned.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do."

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

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 think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.

The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him.

It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.

for real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends.

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

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.

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

Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing.

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

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.

Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?

When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?