Quotes by Doris Lessing

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

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

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there’s a layer of people who run everything. But we – we’re just peasants. We don’t understand what’s going on, and we can’t do anything.
-from The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

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

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it. -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

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

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

I think kids ought to travel. I think it’s very good to carry kids around. It’s good for them. Of course it’s tough on the parents. -Doris Lessing

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. -Doris Lessing

I don’t think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story. -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

I wasn’t an active feminist in the ’60s, never have been. -Doris Lessing

I don’t think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women. -Doris Lessing

The human race has been telling stories since it began. -Doris Lessing

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse. -Doris Lessing

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

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative – despite what current ideology says. -Doris Lessing

What I really can’t stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible. -Doris Lessing

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

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

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

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

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge. -Doris Lessing

It’s very interesting what you don’t care about. -Doris Lessing

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. At the very simplest, it can be: ‘He/she was born, lived, died.’ Probably that is the template of our stories – a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds. -Doris Lessing

What society doesn’t realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don’t now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared. -Doris Lessing

I would not be at all surprised to find out… that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don’t guess. -Doris Lessing

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About Doris Lessing:
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007
Born: 22 October 1919, Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran)
Died: 17 November 2013, London, United Kingdom
Prize motivation: “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”