DORIS LESSING QUOTES
British author (1919-2013)
The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
DORIS LESSING
Children of Violence
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. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself -- educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
DORIS LESSING
introduction, The Golden Notebook
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.
DORIS LESSING
The Times, November 23, 2003
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has The Time
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Coming events cast their shadows before.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
DORIS LESSING
The Four-Gated City
A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, "Perhaps this is THE man."
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Intelligence forbids tears.
DORIS LESSING
A Man and Two Women
The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it ... when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.
DORIS LESSING
Going Home
Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality, into which war-like events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains.
DORIS LESSING
The Four-Gated City
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
DORIS LESSING
The Sunday Times, May 10, 1992
Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
DORIS LESSING
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Quite a few people think it wouldn't take very much to return to a few warrior bands, with a few breeding women. Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
DORIS LESSING
"Doris Lessing Reflects on World, Change", The Washington Post, October 7, 2006
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
DORIS LESSING
The Paris Review, spring 1988
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
DORIS LESSING
The Times, November 23, 2003