She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too.… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler,… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of… — 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
