Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
Doris Lessing
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Grace
Extras
Free
Unnecessary
Given
Essentially
Away
Charm
Nature
Thrown
Power
Spending
Spendthrift
Giving
Role
Superfluous
Something
Roles
Extra
More quotes by Doris Lessing
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
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
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
Doris Lessing
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Doris Lessing
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
The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
Doris Lessing
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Doris Lessing
A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
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
I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
Doris Lessing
I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
Doris Lessing
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
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Doris Lessing
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
Doris Lessing
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
I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
Doris Lessing
I never stopped reading.
Doris Lessing
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
Doris Lessing
We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
Doris Lessing
