Doris Lessing Quotes - Page 3

All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do."

Anna was saying to herself: 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.

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.

Intelligence forbids tears.

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.

Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

The human community is evolving... . We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.

I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.