Quotes from Doris Lessing

Hushabye baby lulled by the storm if you don't harm her she'll do you no harm

A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a millionfold the age of the earth. But these same divines, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilisations; they can't even begin to concede that civilisations might have very old histories.

Mrs. Pearson said dryly: "I can't see me cluttering myself up with kids if I didn't have to. You wouldn't catch me marrying and getting kids if I had my chance over again, but it takes all sorts to make a world.

I remember someone saying that the importance of any public man can be gauged by the number of mellifluous young men he has about him.

SLEEP, for you are not yet dead.

The important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

We sleep our lives away.

They looked down gravely, frowning. He knew the frown. At moments of failure, when he clowned to claim his mother's attention, it was with just this grave, embarrassed inspection that she rewarded him. Through his hot shame, feeling the pleading grin on his face like a scar that he could never remove.

Yet within a few minutes of waking, that country of dream has gone, its taste and reality has drained away into ordinary life. All you have left is an intellectual conviction held in a set of words. You want to remember. You try to remember. You have a set of words to offer your friend, or repeat to yourself. But the reality has gone, evaporated.

our society was dominated by things, artefacts, possessions, machines, objects, and that we judged previous societies by artefacts—things. There was no way of knowing an ancient society's ideas except through the barrier of our own.

It is only in love and in war that we escape from the sleep of necessity, the cage of ordinary life, to a state where every day is a high adventure, every moment falls sharp and clear like a snowflake drifting slowly past a dark glistening rock, or like a leaf spinning down to the forest floor.

Because if what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again. Or even a month the way my thoughts are changing at the moment. Your thoughts are the last thing you can rely on.

Anna directed the silent, compassionate thought towards her daughter: Well my poor girl, you'd better get used to it early, because you're going to have to live in a world full of it.

No one does anything to me, I do it to myself.

Inside she was dissolving in horror at them both, at how far they had both sunk from honesty of emotion.

If a person can be invaded by a personality who isn't theirs, why can't people - I mean people in the mass be invaded by alien personalities.

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brain-washed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes. There is nothing much we can do about this except to remember that it is so. Every one of us is part of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself. These

People have forgotten how badly the refugees from Spain were treated, kept in camps near the border for years, as if they were criminals, to be punished. Well into the sixties, there were a couple of pubs in Soho where intensely poor Spaniards met to talk about how the world had forgotten them, and yet they had been the first to stand up to the Nazis, to the fascists.

Ci siamo mai chiesti quali cambiamenti si determinarono nel nostro cervello quando la gente cominciò a leggere invece di ascoltare?

There are a few of us around in the world, we rely on each other even though we don't know each other's names. But we rely on each other all the time. We're a team, we're the ones who haven't given in, who'll go on fighting.

Long ago I decided that at a political meeting the truth usually comes out in just such a speech or a remark ignored at the time because its tone is not that of the meeting. Humorous, or satirical, or even angry or bitter — yet it's the truth, and all the long speeches and contributions are nonsense.

There are as many shades of being in love as there are graduations of colour on cards in the paint shop.

Anna switched off; something inside her went dead, or moved apart from what was happening. She became a shell. She stood there, looking at words like love, friendship, duty, responsibility and knew them to be all lies.

Di quali ricordi ci possiamo fidare? Basta solo pensarci di sfuggita per accorgersi che i ricordi sono sicuri quanto una bolla di sapone.