Quote

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

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
Women
Appalling
Mothers
Inspiring
Friends
Mother

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
Doris Lessing
Image
I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
Doris Lessing
Image
Writers do not come out of houses without books.
Doris Lessing
Image
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
Doris Lessing
Image
Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing
Image
It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
Doris Lessing
Image
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
Image
When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
Doris Lessing
Image
I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
Doris Lessing
Image
Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
Image
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Doris Lessing
Image
Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
Doris Lessing
Image
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
Doris Lessing
Image
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing
Image
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
Doris Lessing
Image
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.
Doris Lessing
Image
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.
Doris Lessing
Image
The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
Doris Lessing