Quote

Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.

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
Pushers
Boulder
Boulders
Luck

More quotes by 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 should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
Doris Lessing
Image
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing
Image
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
Doris Lessing
Image
I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
Doris Lessing
Image
Literature is analysis after the event.
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
there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
Doris Lessing
Image
Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
Doris Lessing
Image
I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
Doris Lessing
Image
Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
Doris Lessing
Image
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
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
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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
The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
Doris Lessing
Image
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
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
I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
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