People Quotes by Doris Lessing

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

— Doris Lessing

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

— Doris Lessing

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.

— Doris Lessing

When there's a war, people get married.

— Doris Lessing

Mother's room, and mother's need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights.

— Doris Lessing

After a certain age - and for some of us that can be very young - there are no new people, beasts,…

— Doris Lessing

I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem…

— Doris Lessing

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never…

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes,…

— Doris Lessing

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now --…

— Doris Lessing

The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of…

— Doris Lessing

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all…

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not…

— Doris Lessing

The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens…

— Doris Lessing

You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people,…

— Doris Lessing

The 1960s was probably the first time in history that young people were recognized as a big group of consumers and as…

— Doris Lessing

If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one…

— Doris Lessing

I often feel like a dinosaur. I don't get the technology thing at all. I was on the Internet not long ago…

— Doris Lessing

Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a…

— Doris Lessing

I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The…

— Doris Lessing

I think people are always looking for gurus. It's the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It's quite terrifying.…

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think…

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.

— Doris Lessing

When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color…

— Doris Lessing

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in…

— Doris Lessing

[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter…

— Doris Lessing

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of…

— Doris Lessing

When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like…

— Doris Lessing

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one…

— Doris Lessing

People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an…

— Doris Lessing

It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People…

— Doris Lessing

What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world…

— Doris Lessing