Doris Lessing
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.Collection: Passion
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.Collection: Bothered
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.Collection: Desire
Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.Collection: Book
People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating ... an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.Collection: Strong
What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.Collection: Giving
Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.Collection: Arrogant
Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.Collection: Bible
If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.Collection: Dog
Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.Collection: Long Ago
We, as a society, can't tolerate very much difference.Collection: Differences
The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.Collection: Dark
And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.Collection: Moving
I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.Collection: Book
The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.Collection: Summer
Mother's room, and mother's need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights.Collection: Mother
But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.Collection: Children
Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?Collection: Children
As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.Collection: Taken
We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.Collection: Stars
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment.Collection: Advice
Cats mean kittens, plentiful and frequent.Collection: Mean
The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.Collection: Morning
I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.Collection: Numbers
I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.Collection: Stretching
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.Collection: Jobs
Laughter is by definition healthy.Collection: Life
What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?Collection: Months
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.Collection: Art
At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.Collection: Growing Up
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.Collection: Giving Up
People don't mind immoral messages. They don't mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex's sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can't stand is to be told it all doesn't matter, they can't stand formlessness.Collection: Art
We are all creatures of the stars.Collection: Stars
This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.Collection: Movement
I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.Collection: Fiction
I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.Collection: Writing
There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Mutual Help
One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.Collection: Insecure
All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.Collection: Wicked
Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.Collection: Men
Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.Collection: Growing Up
When old settlers say 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native.' They are saying in effect, 'Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don't want you.'Collection: Country
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.Collection: Eye
She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.Collection: Girl
Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.Collection: Men
He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.Collection: Sleep
Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.Collection: Profound
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.Collection: Men