Quote

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

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
Society
Unconscious
Girl
Painful
Young
Girls
Must
Listen
Men
Terrible
Boys
Growing
Wonderful
Bias

More quotes by 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
What matters most is that we learn from living.
Doris Lessing
Image
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
Image
Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
Doris Lessing
Image
The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
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
All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.
Doris Lessing
Image
What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
Doris Lessing
Image
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
Image
Writers do not come out of houses without books.
Doris Lessing
Image
Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
Doris Lessing
Image
The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
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
I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
Doris Lessing
Image
Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
Doris Lessing
Image
The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
Doris Lessing
Image
All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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
Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
Doris Lessing
Image
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
Doris Lessing