Quotes from Doris Lessing

She could not bear to lie in bed and wait, so she pestered the nurse until she could sit on a veranda, screened by a thick curtain of golden shower from the street, because she could assure herself she was not blind by looking through her glowing eyelids at the light from the sky. She sat there all day, and felt the waves of heat and perfume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But nostalgia for what?

But far within him something cried For the great tragedy to start, The pang in lingering mercy fall And sorrow break upon his heart. —EDWIN MUIR

Category: Inner-space fiction For there is never anywhere to go but in.

Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.

We, none of us, said anything to this flight of fancy. It was so far from our prognostications. Besides, we were shocked at his tone. (Of course, now I recognise it as frustrated idealism—now I write the word in connection with Paul it surprises me. It's the first time I've believed he was capable of it.) He

She put that book down and picked up Ellis. Now, it is hardly possible to be bored by a book on sex when one is fifteen, but she was restless because this collection of interesting facts seemed to have so little to do with her own problems.

Long afterwards, I remember thinking that in all those years of endless analytical discussion only once did we come anywhere near the truth (far enough off as it was) and that was when Paul spoke in a spirit of angry parody.

Martha Quest, who thought of herself as so adventurous, so free and unbounded—the fact was, even the idea of picking up a telephone and making herself known to a new person troubled her: she made excuses, she could not do it.

Please don't be alarmed, you'd be surprised how many charming people are walking our streets, the mere ghosts of themselves.

I don't think there's a pattern anywhere - you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren't good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else.

The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau—but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.

When she returned to the office, she found that Mr Jasper Cohen had gone abruptly on holiday. His son had been killed in Spain—he had been shot, near Madrid, rather more than a year before; a friend of his had written, on returning safe to England, to tell his father so.

Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?" "Yes," Ted had said. "Then I can't help you," Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy

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

My brain contains so much that is locked up and unreachable.

We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I

A cat needs a place as much as it needs a person to make its own.

There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.

I have never, in all my life, been so desperately and wildly and painfully happy as I was then. It was so strong I couldn't believe it. I remember saying to myself, This is it, this is being happy, and at the same time I was appalled because it had come out of so much ugliness and unhappiness.

She was human, sensible, shrewd. She was above all, and in every detail, practical. But more than that: she was one of that part of humankind which understands how things work ; and works with them. A grim enough role.

As everybody knows, money is getting very short in Britain, university departments are closing, all kinds of studies are being cut. This type of a science has been badly affected, often the first to be cut -- yet I have just read that in various universities, departments studying psychology, social science and so forth have been reprieved, because of their usefulness to industry. In other words, they are proving their value where it counts.

laughter is by definition heretical, unless used cruelly, turned outwards against an opponent or enemy. Bigots can't laugh. True believers don't laugh. Their idea of laughter is a satirical cartoon pillorying an opposition person or idea. Tyrants and oppressors don't laugh at themselves, and don't tolerate laughter at themselves.

Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching out for happiness.

it seemed to her that she had acquired not virtues but a form of dementia