Doris lessing quotes

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 moving easily under the flesh.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that "other eye," which we can use to judge ourselves.

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along.

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

Laughter is by definition healthy.

if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

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 versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

... if you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies.

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.

Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

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

What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.

I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.

Women are slaves to their beauty.

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?

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

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.

My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

The human community is evolving... . We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.

This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

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 good from the bad– including your own bad.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. 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 versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

What matters most is that we learn from living.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.

Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.

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

Intelligence forbids tears.

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 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.

You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.

Small things amuse small minds.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

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

After a certain age - and for some of us that can be very young - there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.

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

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 else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.

Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.

The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.

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

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

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 could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being.

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.

I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.

It has become a kind of religion that you can't criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not. It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests ... Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did.

Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.

Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting.

Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do."

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

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.

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 your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend, the cat who purrs as you stroke, or rub his chin, or scratch his head.

The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.

I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. 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 to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

For there is never any way to go but in.

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

I was in New York when Clinton was elected the first time, and everyone I knew was in a state of mad euphoria. I wondered what had happened to my hard-headed friends? Almost everyone I knew was drunk on this great white hope. The next time I was in New York, no one had a good word to say about Clinton, but everyone was in love with Hillary. She was the last word. It's all so unreal. Of course, it's no different in England. Here everyone was besotted with Tony Blair. He was a new face. Do people never learn?

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing