Quotes from lessing doris ii

All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.

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. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.

We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.

If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.

When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.

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

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

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

Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.

My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.

London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They're always eating out, and when they're at home they don't cook the way they did ten years ago. They're all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by.

Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

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.

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