Quotes from Doris Lessing

Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.

she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she ws in now could be got through quickly, for it was seeming to her interminable. If life had to be looked at in terms of high moments or peaks, then nothing had happened to her for a long time; and she could look forward to nothing but a dwindling away from full household activities and getting old.

I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all—not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

Secondo me, a farti ricordare qualcosa, di importante o meno, è il fatto che in quel momento eri particolarmente vigile, attento. Per la maggior parte del tempo viviamo in una sorta di trance, non facciamo caso a niente.

That's what I feel too—people aren't taking responsibility for each other. You said the socialists had ceased to be a moral force, for the time, at least, because they wouldn't take moral responsibility. Except for a few people. You said that, didn't you—well then. But you write and write in notebooks, saying what you think about life, but you lock them up, and that's not being responsible." "A very great

I've got a man might do. No good for me, doesn't care for a flutter, and doesn't like Art either. But he has Proust in his overcoat pocket. Come to think of it, I suppose he reads it for the dirt, so no good for you, cancel what I said.

I sense myself, I think of myself; and as I do this I dissolve, go away, am left with nothing, nothing, nothing - unless I am the wind that blows through the immense spaces that lie between electron and electron, proton and its attendants, spaces that cannot be filled with 'nothing', since nothing is 'nothing'... (84)

It's a fact that men of all nations are convinced that men of any other nation are no good for women. I'm sure a statistically significant number of women would be able to vouch for this. And listen how you talk. You are bitter already. When I hear a woman use words like statistics, I know she is bitter.

Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution.

Alex was not the only person I've heard say that being forced to lie in bed with nothing to do for months was the best thing that ever happened to him. In his case, it was TB. He read all the time he was in the sanatorium, and came out looking back with pity on the ignorant youth he had been.

But you know how it is—it's always that moment, when a man looks all wounded in his masculinity, one can't bear it, one needs to bolster him up." "Yes, but they just kick us afterwards as hard as they can, so why do we do it?" "Yes, but I never seem to learn.

What is history? A record of misery, brutality and stupidity. That'a all. That's all it ever will be.

There's something here that I simply will not let myself look at.

Ella had considered this before, with amusement. But she is thinking: No. If they had thought us Lesbian it would have attracted them, they would have been around in swarms. Every man I've ever known has spoken with relish—either openly or unconsciously, about Lesbians. It's an aspect of their incredible vanity: seeing themselves as redeemers of these lost females

I have to conclude that fiction is better at "the truth" than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don't begin to understand. DORIS LESSING

You're suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it.

For she is remembering Paul's saying: There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.

There were occasional cold moments when she thought that she must somehow, even now, check herself on the fatal slope towards marriage, somewhere at the back of her mind was the belief that she would never get married, there would be time to change her mind later. And then the thought of what would happen if she did chilled her.

After all, this situation, a similar one, is bound to roll around again, in a different context, a different history. Everything does. And the next time, will we (humankind) recognise it and do better?

What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss.

I see I am falling into the self-punishing, cynical tone again. Yet how comforting this tone is, like a sort of poultice on a wound.

Looking back over nearly a quarter of a century, she saw that that had been the characteristic of her life -passivity, adaptability to others.

Die Zeit nimmt auf niemanden Rücksicht, ob es uns nun gefällt oder nicht.

But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi's, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself.