574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

For there is never any way to go but in.

Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.

We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

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

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? 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.

Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.