574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.

I haven't got the energy to write now.

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

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks. But we can't all be physicists.

I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.

Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.