there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The human community is evolving... . We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born - and yet in each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from his low half-animal state to… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
“They have not yet evolved into an understanding of their individual selves as merely parts of a whole, first of all humanity,… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world's great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth… — 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 am on my side, she crouches looking into my face. Soft, soft touches of her paw. I open my eyes, say I don't want to wake. I close my eyes. Cat gently pats my eyelids. Cat… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
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 the time she was thinking: I’m right off balance. I feel as if the atmosphere of this flat were being poisoned, as if a spirit of perverse and ugly spite were everywhere. Yet it’s nonsense. The… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
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 held an infant or a small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a body...… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
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 to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula. — Doris Lessing Copy Share
“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
