... if you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“I was marvelling, again, how easy it is, living deprived, to forget love, joy, delight.” — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
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… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“If one person has loved another truly and wholly, then it is more than love that collapses when one side of the… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“There are as many shades of being in love as there are graduations of colour on cards in the paint shop.” — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that.… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“Saw in the review of a book recently: “One of those unfortunate affairs—women, even the nicest of them, tend to fall in… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our hearts in our… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
People don't mind immoral messages. They don't mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex's sake… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticises her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest, and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“She was using the water as she had used the fruit earlier—to calm herself, to assure herself of the possibility of normality. Yet all… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane.” — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
