574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

When you’re young you think that you’re going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there’s a layer of people who run everything. But we – we’re just peasants. We don’t understand what’s going on, and we can’t do anything.

Oh cat, I’d say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.

When there’s a war, people get married.

Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And.

It is individuals who change societies, give birth to ideas, who, standing out against tides of opinions, change them. This is as true in open societies as it is in oppressive societies.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that ‘nothing succeeds like success.’

On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn’t discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one – but no one at all – can tell you what to read and when and how.