Quote

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

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
Sense
Guilt
Accident
Human
Avoid
Chief
Humans
Brings
Chiefs
Fumes
Looks
Deny
Native
Whip
Men
Justice
Africa
Denies
Eyes
Accidents
Whips
Eye
Sees
Preoccupation
White
Diversity
Resentment

More quotes by 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
One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
Doris Lessing
Image
September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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
I never stopped reading.
Doris Lessing
Image
All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Doris Lessing
Image
What is a hero without love for mankind.
Doris Lessing
Image
Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
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 is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
Doris Lessing
Image
I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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
We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
Doris Lessing
Image
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
Doris Lessing