Doris Lessing Quotes - Page 9

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

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. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.

When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

Men are unwise and curiously planned.

I never stopped reading.

I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

When there's a war, people get married.

Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.

I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.

The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.

I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.

Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.

When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.