Quote

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

Doris Lessing

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Love
Faults
Angel
Friend
Trust
Woman
Without

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
Doris Lessing
Image
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
Doris Lessing
Image
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing
Image
All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
Doris Lessing
Image
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
Image
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
Doris Lessing
Image
This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
Doris Lessing
Image
Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
Doris Lessing
Image
All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Doris Lessing
Image
You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
Doris Lessing
Image
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
Image
I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
Doris Lessing
Image
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
Doris Lessing
Image
What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
Doris Lessing
Image
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Doris Lessing
Image
Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
Doris Lessing
Image
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing
Image
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
Image
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
Doris Lessing
Image
Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
Doris Lessing