Doris Lessing Quotes

203 quotes in 2298 categories

• I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps…
• For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
• All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones…
• Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
• It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From…
• There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
• We are all creatures of the stars.
• I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window.…
• Laughter is by definition healthy.
• Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.
• Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are…
• If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she…
• As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.
• I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
• How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to...
• People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
• You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
• I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
• Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
• 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…

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