Quotes from Doris Lessing

The point is, it seems to me that my mind is a mass of totally contradictory attitudes about everything.' 'Everyone's mind is a mass of contradictory attitudes. Why should it matter?' 'It should matter to us, surely?

You talk as if—a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can't be anything else. You can't change that.' 'Well then, I think that's the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.' 'Then I don't follow you. And I don't want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful.... You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles.

Žena bez muškarca ne može se upoznati s muškarcem, s bilo kojim muškarcem , bilo koje dobi, a da ne pomisli, makar to bilo i na pola sekunde: Možda je ovo pravi muškarac.

They have not yet evolved into an understanding of their individual selves as merely parts of a whole, first of all humanity, their own species, let alone achieving a conscious knowledge of humanity as part of Nature; plants, animals, birds, insects reptiles, and all these together making a small chord in the Cosmic Harmony

On nous définit encore, même les gens les plus évolués, en fonctions de nos relations avec les hommes.

Es terrible destruir la imagen que una persona tiene de sí misma en aras de la verdad o cualquier otra abstracción. ¿Cómo saber si será capaz de crear otra que le permita seguir viviendo?

The tale must be rehearsed–and we may amuse ourselves imagining how these must have been, often, acrimonious, or at least in dispute. Whose version of events is going to be committed to memory by the Memories?

I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off.

You won't change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.

Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone.

a family wanting no more than to live without challenge or drama could easily find a quiet street, and peace, provided they were fortunate enough to live in a comparatively sheltered and favoured geographical area, and provided they were able to make the mental adjustment to relegate war - and its consequences - into something that happened elsewhere and did not affect them; or something that had happened to them, but between such and such dates, and then taken itself off.

She had taken a degree in Domestic Science in a college in northern England, and used notebooks from her class to order the household's meals. Sunday: roast beef. Monday: collops with sippets of toast (mince). Tuesday: beef stew. Wednesday: brawn. Thursday: steak and kidney pie. Friday: stewed oxheart. Saturday: tripe and onions. To be a white housewife was hardly arduous.

Yet I think we may very well see countries that take it for granted they are democracies losing sight of democracy, for we are living in a time when the great over-simplifiers are very powerful.

For better or worse, we are prepared to experiment with ourselves, to try and be different kinds of people. But you simply submitted to something.

The things that are important in life creep up on one unawared, one doesn't expect them, one hasn't given them shape in one's mind. One recognizes them, when they've appeared, that's all.

Here tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her other organs could not. She sat poised, air-light, looking, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, with all of her, fur, whiskers, ears---everything, in delicate vibration.

Women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create a man.

Half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine.

Emotion is a trap, it delivers you into the hands of society, that's why people are measuring it out.

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.

Perhaps it is not correct to say that she read it, for unfortunately the number of people who actually read magazines, papers or even books is very small indeed.

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by "tolerantly amused eyes" was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, 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