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Doris Lessing: 188 quotes23 likes

“Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.”

Doris Lessing

The Summer Before the Dark (1973)

“What is a hero without love for mankind?”

Doris Lessing

Was ist ein Held ohne Menschenliebe! Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Philotas (1759), Act 1, Scene 7 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8phts10.txt Misattributed

“I was taken around and shown things as a "useful idiot" … that’s what my role was … I can’t understand why I was so gullible.”

Doris Lessing

In interview, quoted in part 1 of Useful Idiots - BBC World Service (7 July 2010) https://web.archive.org/web/20101008193804/http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2010/07/100624_doc_useful_idiots_lenin.shtml part 1 on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/useful-idiots/id438700488?i=1000094122641&mt=2

“If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.”

Doris Lessing book Particularly Cats

Particularly Cats, ch. 2 (1967)

“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"
The Golden Notebook (1962)

“For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.”

Doris Lessing

Käthe Kollwitz, diary entry (1 January 1912)
Misattributed

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”

Doris Lessing

As quoted in Writers on Writing (1986) by Jon Winokur

“Literature is analysis after the event.”

Doris Lessing

Quoted in Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, ed. Michael Horovitz (1969): Afterwords, section 2

“You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.”

Doris Lessing

quoted in "A Talk With Doris Lessing; Lessing Author's Query" (30 March 1980), Minda Bikman, New York Times Book Review

“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. … I was really astounded that some people were shocked.”

Doris Lessing

As quoted in an undated profile at the BBC World Service http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/lessing_being.shtml

“It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.”

Doris Lessing

Denn zu einem großen Manne gehört beides: Kleinigkeiten als Kleinigkeiten, und wichtige Dinge als wichtige Dinge zu behandeln. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767 - 1769), Vierunddreißigstes Stück Den 25. August 1767 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10055/10055-8.txt Misattributed

“Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.”

Doris Lessing

Interview with Amanda Craig, "Grand dame of letters who's not going quietly," The Times, London (23 November 2003)
Variant: Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

“Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.”

Doris Lessing

The Guardian, London (7 November 1988)

“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.”

Doris Lessing

The Sunday Times, London (10 May 1992)

“All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.”

Doris Lessing

As quoted in An Uncommon Scold (1989) by Abby Adams, p. 18

“Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.”

Doris Lessing

As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 660

“The worst of superstitions is to think
One's own most bearable.”

Doris Lessing

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise (1779), Act IV, scene II http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/natws10.txt Variant translation: The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable. Misattributed

“I have found it to be true that the older I've become the better my life has become.”

Doris Lessing

Rush Limbaugh, as quoted in Old Age Is Always 15 Years Older Than I Am (2001) by Randy Voorhees
Misattributed

“There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a few days before, words like democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of understanding of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power. I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I. I. I. I. of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war; and I knew how strong these emotions were, in a way that would never leave me, would become part of how I saw the world.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 4"
The Golden Notebook (1962)

“I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world-ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects, and creeds. But it was an attempt.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Introduction (1971)
The Golden Notebook (1962)