Doris Lessing Quotes About Eyes

Quotes about: Eyes

• What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend, the cat who purrs as you stroke, or rub his chin, or scratch his head.

  Doris Lessing

  Lonely, Cat, Eye

• When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

  Doris Lessing

  Eye, Men, White Man

  The Grass is Singing (1950) ch. 8

• 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 understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

  Doris Lessing

  Attitude, Confused, Eye

  "The Golden Notebook". Book by Doris Lessing, www.theguardian.com. 1962.

• You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes.

  Doris Lessing

  Drama, Taken, Eye

• I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that "other eye," which we can use to judge ourselves.

  Doris Lessing

  Eye, People, Judging

  Doris Lessing (2013). “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside”, p.6, Harper Collins

• Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting.

  Doris Lessing

  Running, Morning, Eye

  Doris Lessing (2012). “This Was the Old Chief’s Country: Collected African Stories Volume One”, p.6, HarperCollins UK

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