Not so easy to put flesh and blood on the bones of an intellectual conviction; Martha was remembering with shame the brash and easy way she had said to Joss that she repudiated race prejudice; for the fact was, she could not remember a time when she had not thought of people in terms of groups, nations, or colour of skin first, and as people afterwards.

— Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing Quotes

Her look at him was now as aggressive as his had been. ‘It’s all very well for you, you’re a man,’ she said bitterly, and entirely without coquetry; but he said flippantly, even suggestively, ‘It will be all quite well for you too!

— Doris Lessing

We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I.

— Doris Lessing

Here tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her other organs could not. She sat poised, air-light, looking, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, with all of her, fur, whiskers, ears – everything, in delicate vibration.

— Doris Lessing

Kittens, kittens, showers of kittens, visitations of kittens. So many, you see them as Kitten, like leaves growing on a bare branch, staying heavy and green, then falling, exactly the same every year. People coming to visit say: What happened to that lovely kitten? What lovely kitten? They are all lovely kittens.

— Doris Lessing

Women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create a man.

— Doris Lessing

Half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine.

— Doris Lessing

Emotion is a trap, it delivers you into the hands of society, that’s why people are measuring it out.

— Doris Lessing

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being ‘objective.’ Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the ‘Anna’ of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.

— Doris Lessing

We live in an open society. We pride ourselves on it, and so we should. An open society is distinguished by the fact that government may not keep information from its citizens, must allow the circulation of ideas. But what we have, we take for granted. What we are used to, we cease to value. Generations of our forebears fought for the freedom of ideas, so that we may have what we do have.

— Doris Lessing

While the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are amoung the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, color predjudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.

— Doris Lessing

We hope that your period of immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and stupid ideas into practice. “If you are lucky, you will emerge much enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white.

— Doris Lessing

Nearly all the pressures from outside are in terms of group beliefs, group needs, national needs, patriotism and the demands of local loyalties, such as to your city and local groups of all kinds. But more subtle and more demanding – more dangerous – are the pressures from inside, which demand that you should conform, and it is these that are the hardest to watch and to control.

— Doris Lessing

We need a shape for the tale. A beginning, a middle and an end.

— Doris Lessing

I don’t think there’s a pattern anywhere – you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren’t good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else.

— Doris Lessing

That’s what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable.

— Doris Lessing

We have almost reached a point where if one values democracy, one is denounced as reactionary. I think that this will be one of the attitudes that will be found most fascinating to historians of the future. For one thing, the young people who cultivate this attitude towards democracy are usually those who have never experienced its opposite: people who’ve lived under tyranny, value democracy.

— Doris Lessing

My brain contains so much that is locked up and unreachable.

— Doris Lessing

A cat needs a place as much as it needs a person to make its own.

— Doris Lessing

Yet I think we may very well see countries that take it for granted they are democracies losing sight of democracy, for we are living in a time when the great over-simplifiers are very powerful.

— Doris Lessing

There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.

— Doris Lessing
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