Quote

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

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
Written
Write
Writing
Worm
Way
Silk
Always
Worms
Producing
Animal
Stop

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
What matters most is that we learn from living.
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
we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
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
Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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
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
[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
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
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
The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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
If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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
It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.
Doris Lessing
Image
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Doris Lessing
Image
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
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
Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
Doris Lessing
Image
Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
Doris Lessing