Doris Lessing

“I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.”

“When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.”

“Pearls mean tears.”

“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.”

“You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.”

“I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.”

“It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.”

“It's a hard case,' said Paul. 'First, I'm twenty. That means I'm very nervous and ill-at-ease with women. Second, I'm twenty. I have all my life before me, and frankly the prospect often appals me. Thirdly, I'm twenty, and I'm in love with Anna and my heart is breaking.”

“Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.”

“Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider's egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling locks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing.”

“I am your original autodidact.”

“It's very interesting what you don't care about.”

“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: '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 judgements. 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 particular society.”

“It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”

“You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.”

“I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.”

“she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she was in now could be got through quickly, for it was seeing to her interminable. If life had to be looked at in terms of high moments. or peaks, then nothing had "happened" to her for a long time; snd she could look forward to nothing much but a dwindling away from full household activity into getting old”

“I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.”

“In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.”