574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

[On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable?

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.

... it is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it ...

Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.

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.

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.