574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

As you get older, you don’t get wiser. You get irritable.

If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let’s make a foursome!

No one’s noticed. So much is destroyed, we can’t be bothered.

There’s an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion – “nostalgia” is their word for it – which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined.

As always he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul.

I don’t think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It’s only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her. – BARON CORVO.

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.