Doris Lessing Quotes

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Doris Lessing

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 22, 1919

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

Doris Lessing

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

Doris Lessing

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.

Doris Lessing

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.

Doris Lessing

Small things amuse small minds.

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

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.

Doris Lessing

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

Doris Lessing

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.

Doris Lessing

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

Doris Lessing

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

Doris Lessing

When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.

Doris Lessing