Doris Lessing Quotes

203 quotes in 2298 categories

• At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing…
• It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody…
• A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is…
• Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
• What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under…
• Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who…
• Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the…
• The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any…
• He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so…
• What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
• Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by…
• I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength…
• Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I…
• In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen…
• Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They…
• Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise…
• For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I…
• Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
• Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
• ...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use…

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