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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
Doris Lessing
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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
Men
Except
Motivational
Asks
Anything
Everything
Need
Needs
Long
None
More quotes by Doris Lessing
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Doris Lessing
Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
Doris Lessing
I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
Doris Lessing
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
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
I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
Doris Lessing
I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
Doris Lessing
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.
Doris Lessing
The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
Doris Lessing
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
All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
Doris Lessing
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
Doris Lessing
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
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
The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
Doris Lessing
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
Doris Lessing
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
The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
Doris Lessing
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
America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
Doris Lessing
