Quote

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

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
Must
Revolutionary
Every
Inevitable
Easily
Expect
Movement
Stage
Disowned
Happy
Recognizable
Enjoy
Reformers

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
Doris Lessing
Image
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
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
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Doris Lessing
Image
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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
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
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
Doris Lessing
Image
It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
Doris Lessing
Image
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Doris Lessing
Image
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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
Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
Doris Lessing
Image
It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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
Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
Doris Lessing
Image
Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
Doris Lessing
Image
I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
Doris Lessing
Image
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Doris Lessing
Image
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing