01UndatedIt is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
02UndatedIt is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
03UndatedThere is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
06UndatedGrowing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
07UndatedThat's what learning is. You suddenly understand something you understood all your life but in a new way.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
08UndatedWomen 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 / quote ↗
09UndatedWhat society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
10UndatedWe use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
12UndatedI see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
13UndatedThe 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 / quote ↗
14UndatedSeptember 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 / quote ↗
15UndatedMan, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!Doris Lessing / quote ↗
16UndatedI think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
17UndatedI do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
18UndatedWhat really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
19UndatedHumanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
20UndatedWhen you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
21UndatedThere's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.Doris Lessing / quote ↗
