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

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
Away
Charm
Nature
Thrown
Power
Spending
Spendthrift
Giving
Role
Superfluous
Something
Roles
Extra
Grace
Extras
Free
Unnecessary
Given
Essentially

More quotes by 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
The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
Doris Lessing
Image
She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
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
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
Doris Lessing
Image
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
Doris Lessing
Image
For there is never any way to go but in.
Doris Lessing
Image
My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
Doris Lessing
Image
This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
Doris Lessing
Image
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
Image
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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
What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
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
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Doris Lessing
Image
The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
Doris Lessing
Image
I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
Doris Lessing
Image
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
Image
Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
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