Doris Lessing quotes

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. (Doris Lessing)
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Doris Lessing
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
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing
Laughter is by definition healthy.
Doris Lessing
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing
Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing
This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.
Doris Lessing
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Doris Lessing
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools. (Doris Lessing)
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
Doris Lessing
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
Doris Lessing
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
Doris Lessing
Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
Doris Lessing
Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
Doris Lessing
What is a hero without love for mankind.
Doris Lessing
What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
Doris Lessing
Small things amuse small minds. (Doris Lessing)
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.
Doris Lessing
All sanity depends on this that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.
Doris Lessing
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
Doris Lessing
Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing