74 Top Quotes By Doris Lessing, The Author Of The Golden Notebook
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.
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.
Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
There is only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best
How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to...
Laughter is by definition healthy.
We are all creatures of the stars.
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.
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.
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.
I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over.
Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.
We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
