Doris Lessing Quotes

Doris Lessing is a famous British writer, famous for The Golden Notebook, a seminal work in feminist literature. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature (along with numerous other awards). Here are a few quotes from Doris Lessing.

• "All sanity depends on this that is should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh."
  - Doris Lessing
  
  
• "And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom."
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• "Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so."
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• "For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying."
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• "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."
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• "I have found it to be true that the older I've become the better my life has become."
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• "If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air."
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• "In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better."
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• "In the university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools."
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• "It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important."
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• "Literature is analysis after the event."
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• "Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time."
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• "The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country."
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• "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."
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• "The 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."
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• "The two women were alone in the London flat."
  - Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
  
  
• "There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be."
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• "Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself."
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• "This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we--we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything."
  - Doris Lessing
  
  
• "Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel."
  - Doris Lessing
  
  
• "We, as a society, can't tolerate very much difference."
  - Doris Lessing
  
  
• "What matters most is that we learn from living."
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• "What's terrible is to pretend that the 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."
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• "With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one--but no one at all--can tell you what to read and when and how."
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• "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself-educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society."
  - Doris Lessing