Quotes from Doris Lessing

Education means only this- that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education.

Paul was even more difficult than Ben. But he was a normal "disturbed" child, not an alien.

However, there are certain rites in the talk of matrons, and Martha, having listened to such talk for a large part of her life, should have learned that there was nothing insulting, or even personal, intended. She was merely expected to play the part 'young girl' against their own familiar roles.

Jonathan Quest, the younger brother, came home for the holidays from his expensive school, like a visitor from a more prosperous world. For the first time, Martha found herself consciously resenting him. Why, she asked herself, was it that he, with half her brains, should be sent to a 'good school', why was it he should inevitably be given the advantages?

It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.

That's the point—anything might be true anywhere, there's never any way of really knowing the truth about anything. Anything is possible—everything's so crazy, anything at all's possible.

When a woman begins making love with a new man, a creature is born in her - of emotional and sexual responses that grows in its own laws, its own logic.

Then the man goes to the woman and says: I love you. And she says, in terror: What do you mean? He says: I love you. So she embraces him, and he moves away, with nervous haste, and she says: Why did you say you loved me? And he says: I wanted to hear how it would sound. And she says: But I love you, I love you, I love you – and he goes off to the very edge of the roof and stands there, ready to jump – he will jump if she says even once again: I love you

It's a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won't accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won't accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.

Listen Anna, if we don't believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there's no hope for us. We're going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.

As I was saying, that's the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream.

Could we have seen this efflorescence of stupidity? Yes, because every mass political movement unleashes the worst in human behaviour and admires it. For a time at least.

Aber eins weiß ich schon jetzt. Worum wir trauern, wenn uns Angehörige sterben, das sind die ungeführten Gespräche.

Ch? có má»™t tá»™i lá»—i th?t sá»± và ??y là tá»± thuy?t ph?c mình r?ng Ä'i?u t?t nhì là Ä'i?u t?t nh?t.

It's painful thinking of the people one has been cruel to.

Pagan? Ah,that is a joyous word for the aridity of Godless modern man!

Sometimes when I, Anna, look back, I want to laugh out loud. It is the appalled, envious laughter of knowledge at innocence. I would be incapable now of such trust. I, Anna, would never begin an affair with Paul. Or Michael. Or rather, I would begin an affair, just that, knowing exactly what would happen; I would begin a deliberately barren, limited relationship. What Ella lost during those five years was the power to create through naivety.

But the fact is, again and again in my lifetime, the vicious vituperations, the polemics, the dialectics, the sophistries of politics have become vapour and mist, while what remains is the literature and the art, which at the time might have been merely tolerated by the politicos.

That's what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable…

Los gatos no tienen lugar en una existencia que transcurre de un lado para otro, de una habitación a otra. Necesitan un sitio fijo tanto como una persona que los convierta en suyos.

Martha's heart was beating wildly for several reasons. No one had ever tried to put his hand up her skirt before, and she was petrified at the wild driving. She looked confused and alarmed; and the old Scotsman decided to see her as the little girl he had known for years. He took a ten-shilling note from his stuffed wallet, and gave it to her. 'For when you go back to school,' he said bluffly.

We said that when we read in the reports of their assemblies that Comrade Stalin had spoken for five hours and the applause lasted for half an hour, we were incredulous. In our culture – we boasted – there could not be this kind of reverence for a leader. In fact, the very word 'leader' was an embarrassment. Decades later, with what chagrin did I read, during the reign of Thatcher, 'wild applause for fifteen minutes'. Thus does Time punish our arrogances.

Yes," said Willi, calmly. "You are an old nuisance. You can sit down if you like, but you must keep quiet and not talk nonsense." Maryrose turned quite white with fright and with pain on behalf of her mother. But Mrs Fowler, after a moment's silence, gave a short flustered laugh and sat down and kept perfectly quiet. And after that, if she came into the Gainsborough she always behaved with Willi like a well-brought-up small girl in the presence of a bullying father. And

Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself.