Quotes from lessing doris

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

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

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

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

Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.

It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.

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.

Coming events cast their shadows before.

Intelligence forbids tears.

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 star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.

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.

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

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 flesh.

Quite a few people think it wouldn't take very much to return to a few warrior bands, with a few breeding women. Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality, into which war-like events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains.