Quote

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

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
Terrible
Interest
Inspirational
Truth
Persons
Abstraction
Person
Interests
Destroy
Picture

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
Doris Lessing
Image
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.
Doris Lessing
Image
I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
Doris Lessing
Image
I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
Doris Lessing
Image
If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
Image
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
Image
We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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
One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
Doris Lessing
Image
Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
Doris Lessing
Image
It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
Doris Lessing
Image
All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
Doris Lessing
Image
Better Counsel comes overnight.
Doris Lessing
Image
I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?
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
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
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.
Doris Lessing
Image
My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
Doris Lessing
Image
Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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