Doris Lessing Quotes - Page 13

Quotes about:

• My father was in the First World War.

  Doris Lessing

  Father, War, World

  Doris Lessing (2003). “A Home for the Highland Cattle and the Antheap”, p.142, Broadview Press

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• When there's a war, people get married.

  Doris Lessing

  War, People, Married

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• There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

  Doris Lessing

  Ordinary, Flats, Feels

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• There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

  Doris Lessing

  People, Literature, Young

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• Writers do not come out of houses without books.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Reading, House

  "A Hunger for Books" by Doris Lessing, www.theguardian.com. December 08, 2007.

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• for real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends.

  Doris Lessing

  Real, Should Have, Pleasure

  Doris Lessing (2010). “Stories”, p.157, Vintage

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• Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

  Doris Lessing

  Time, Space, Fiction

  The Guardian (London), November 7, 1988.

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• Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.

  Doris Lessing

  Fighting, Female Writers, Needs

  "Killing Her Softly" by Joseph O'Neil, www.theatlantic.com. September 2010.

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• It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.

  Doris Lessing

  Country, Borders, Easy

  Doris May Lessing (1991). “Martha Quest”, Plume

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• On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn't discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East.

  Doris Lessing

  Horse, War, Divorce

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• September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

  Doris Lessing

  September 11, Ira, Terrible

  "September 11 wasn't that bad, says Nobel winner Lessing" by Haroon Siddique, www.theguardian.com. October 23, 2007.

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• The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

  Doris Lessing

  Dream, Hurt, War

  "A hunger for books" by Doris Lessing, www.theguardian.com. December 8, 2007.

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• Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.

  Doris Lessing

  Stars, Cutting, People

  'The Habit of Loving' (1957) ch. 17

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• My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

  Doris Lessing

  Mother, Brother, Frustrated

  Doris May Lessing (1996). “Putting questions differently: interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994”

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• What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks. But we can't all be physicists.

  Doris Lessing

  Writing, Science, Dwarves

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Sirian Experiments (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 3)”, p.8, HarperCollins UK

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• What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.

  Doris Lessing

  Sticks, Talent, Capacity

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• What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.

  Doris Lessing

  Men, Long, Kitchen

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.9, HarperCollins UK

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• I often feel like a dinosaur. I don't get the technology thing at all. I was on the Internet not long ago for Barnes and Noble, and people were ringing up from all over the world - Australia, Canada, France. I experienced it as an informal chat, which was pleasant, but I couldn't quite take it in. It had a strong element of unreality. I can't be bothered to switch to a computer at my age, though I might get along with e-mail, which sounds appealing.

  Doris Lessing

  Strong, Technology, Long

  Source: progressive.org

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• When the print revolution occurred 400 years ago, human beings lost a certain mental capacity, including a sense of memory. In Africa today, you meet people who still carry everything in their heads, the way we used to. We rely on telephone books, address books. We have to look up everything.

  Doris Lessing

  Memories, Book, People

  Source: progressive.org

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• I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along. I'm constantly changing my perspective on my own life. I see the past differently, and that's a wonderful thing.

  Doris Lessing

  Past, Thinking, Perspective

  Source: progressive.org

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• There are many feminists who work in the media, and they think that feminism is very important. It is in their own lives, but mostly feminism has had an impact among privileged women in the advanced Western countries. For the most part, it hasn't begun to touch the lives of poor and working women in the Third World, and that distresses me.

  Doris Lessing

  Country, Thinking, Feminist

  Source: progressive.org

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• America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.

  Doris Lessing

  Country, Fun, Hate

  Source: progressive.org

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• In Shanghai, I saw great contrasts. On one street there would be impressive shops selling copies of the latest word in glamorous European fashion, and around the corner on a back street there were poor families crammed into one room with a naked light bulb. One evening I heard a Chinese family singing "Happy Birthday." It was weird. You would have thought that they'd have their own happy birthday song. Every dominant society in the world - whether it's French or British or American - imposes its culture on less developed societies.

  Doris Lessing

  Fashion, Song, Chinese

  Source: progressive.org

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• Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the next century. At least half of them I didn't understand at all, though I'm sure that kids today would know exactly what he meant. I'm somewhere in the past. I do think, however, that our brains have been damaged by technology. I meet kids who don't seem to be capable of reading a long sentence, much less a long book.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Reading, Kids

  Source: progressive.org

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• I wonder why do wars suddenly start and suddenly stop, and why do we Brits and you Americans get involved in some of them and not in others? Is it possible that the arms manufacturers quietly foment wars without us knowing? Dropping bombs is a very profitable business for them. Gore Vidal was talking about this the other day, and he made a lot of sense. Whenever American policy seems inscrutable, he said, remember the military-industrial complex. He's the one who should have been President.

  Doris Lessing

  War, President, Remember

  Source: progressive.org

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