Quote

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

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
Craving
Loneliness
Lack
Company
Spirit
Thought
Cramping
People
Unnoticed
Companionship

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
Image
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing
Image
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
Image
There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
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
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
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 matters most is that we learn from living.
Doris Lessing
Image
The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
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
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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
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
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
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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
The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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