Quotes by Doris Lessing

About Doris Lessing:

Doris May Lessing is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Doris Lessing

In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest, and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I am on my side, she crouches looking into my face. Soft, soft touches of her paw. I open my eyes, say I don't want to wake. I close my eyes. ...

Doris Lessing

Her ears, lightly fringed with white that looked silver, lifted and moved, back, forward, listening and sensing. Her face turned, slightly, after each new sensation, alert. Her tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her...

Doris Lessing

The kitten was six weeks old. It was enchanting, a delicate fairy-tale cat, whose Siamese genes showed in the shape of the face, ears, tail, and the subtle lines of its body. [...] She sat, a tiny thing, in the middle of a yellow carpet, surrounded b...

Doris Lessing

Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a she...

Doris Lessing

Yeah, it always amazes me how quickly people turn into good little socialists when they run out of their stuff. As long as they have something, it's theirs. Let them run out, and you need to share.

Doris Lessing

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.

Doris Lessing

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

Doris Lessing

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never...

Doris Lessing

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 ...

Doris Lessing

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. W...

Doris Lessing

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.

Doris Lessing

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 still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

Doris Lessing

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. (So why write novels? Inde...

Doris Lessing

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.

Doris Lessing

Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

Doris Lessing

The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

Doris Lessing

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. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Bloo...

Doris Lessing

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.

Doris Lessing

I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, 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...

Doris Lessing

She thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don’t know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too clos...

Doris Lessing

Author Bio

  • NameDoris Lessing
  • DescriptionBritish novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer
  • BornOctober 22, 1919
  • DiedNovember 17, 2013
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Novelist; Playwright; Autobiographer
  • WorksThe Grass Is Singing; The Golden Notebook; The Good Terrorist; The Cleft
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Somerset Maugham Award; Austrian State Prize For European Literature; WH Smith Literary Award; Grinzane Cavour Prize; James Tait Black Memorial Prize; David Cohen Prize; Prince Of Asturia Literary Prize