Quotes from Doris Lessing

The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane.

He leaves and she thinks for the hundredth time that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.

Yes, it's because it's one thing to think poor things and another to allow that African politics could have any resemblance at all to English politics—even such a long time ago.

For suddenly it had changed into that gear when time is slower - as when, falling off a ladder, one has time to think: I shall land so, just there, and I must turn in the air slightly... All this in a space of time normally too short for any thought at all. But we are wrong in dividing the mind's machinery from time: they are the same. It is only in such sharp emphatic moments that we recognize this fact.

students should be told that an effort is always required, when you start to read a serious author, to overcome mental laziness and reluctance, because you are about to enter the mind of someone who thinks differently from yourself. And that is the whole point and the only point: the literary treasure-house has many mansions.

She wanted to be acknowledged, her predicament given its value.

Poor economies breed tyrannies.

I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

Then he said, 'Well, Matty, we don't seem to go together at all, do we. I'm simply not broadminded enough for your Jews and your niggers.

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

We live in an open society. We pride ourselves on it, and so we should. An open society is distinguished by the fact that government may not keep information from its citizens, must allow the circulation of ideas. But what we have, we take for granted. What we are used to, we cease to value. Generations of our forebears fought for the freedom of ideas, so that we may have what we do have.

Victim-eyes of impersonal tragedy, to be impersonal no longer.

While the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are amoung the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, color predjudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.

The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her. —BARON CORVO

The young often have moments of clear thinking, which as they grow older become fewer, and muddied. He had kept alive in some part of him a knowledge that he was "destined" to do something or other. He felt this as pure and unsullied, but—more often and more deeply as he grew older—"impractical".

she could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.

We have become desensitized. Watching, night after night, day after day, year after year, the horrors going on all over the world have desensitized us exactly as those soldiers have been deliberately brutalized. No one set out to brutalize us, to make us callous; but that is what we increasingly are.

They turned into wrong and destructive paths believing that they were better than others whose belief in self-interest was open and expressed, better because they, and they alone, knew how the practical affairs of the planet should be conducted. An emotional reaction to the sufferings of Shikasta seemed to them a sufficient qualification for curing them.

Choose? When do I ever choose? Have I ever chosen?

Even the most sketchily educated and ill-informed youngster had at his or her fingertips facts that had to contradict, in all kinds of ways, obvious and implicit, the propagandas which afflicted them.

And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laughs, and he calls his wife and says: Look, we are seeing something that ceased to exist millions of years ago—and she sees, exactly, and laughs with him.

Harriet's parents had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy one.

Do you really think it's right for a socialist to get what he wants by making a fool of an old woman?' 'I'm earning her a lot of money.' 'I was talking about sex,' said Paul, and Willi said: 'I don't know what you mean.' He didn't. Men are far more unconscious than women about using their sex this way; far less honest.

themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.