Quote

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

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
Become
Expecting
Young
Notice
Women
Focus
Life
Middle
People
Attention
Anonymous
Show
Aged
Woman
Admired
Shows
Noticed

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Doris Lessing
Image
Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
Doris Lessing
Image
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
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
We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
Doris Lessing
Image
For there is never any way to go but in.
Doris Lessing
Image
I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
Doris Lessing
Image
we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
Doris Lessing
Image
Writers do not come out of houses without books.
Doris Lessing
Image
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
Image
Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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
Image
I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing
Image
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
Doris Lessing
Image
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
Image
Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
Doris Lessing
Image
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing
Image
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
Doris Lessing