British author (1919-2013)
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then -- we went on dancing.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul
There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
DORIS LESSING
The Grass Is Singing
I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, Shoptalk: Learning to Write with Writers
Every child has the capacity to be everything.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature inaccurate.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Curse not the king, no not in thy thought;
and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber,
for a bird of the air shall carry the voice,
and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
DORIS LESSING
Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher
I woke up one morning, and I couldn't move my arm. It was the oddest thing, the paralysis. I called up a friend and said, "I think I've had a stroke," and, in fact, that's what my doctor told me. It wasn't terrible, but it was enough to scare me. Now I think about death all the time. I have my death arm, my right arm.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The Progressive, June 1999
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
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
introduction, The Golden Notebook
Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.
DORIS LESSING
The Summer Before the Dark
It was all nonsense to see things in terms of peaks and crises: the personal events, like the public ones, were long-term affairs, after all. They built up.... It is after--at least months, but it is usually years--that a person will say, My God, my whole life has changed, talking about a passion of love or hate, a marriage, a testing job of work. My life has changed because I have changed.
DORIS LESSING
The Summer Before the Dark
Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
I don't share the widely held admiration for the 1960s. I was in London, "Swinging London," as it was called, and I saw a lot of suicides and a lot of people who ended up in loony bins. There were a great many casualties. The 1960s was a dangerous decade -- though, of course, the politics of that time was very attractive. Nothing is more attractive than people playing at being revolutionaries. The people who were involved in Paris, 1968, and all that, I find very attractive. Of course, I was too old to really enjoy the 1960s. By the time 1968 rolled around, I was almost fifty. I should have been in my twenties.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The Progressive, June 1999
What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta