574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

If one person has loved another truly and wholly, then it is more than love that collapses when one side of the indissoluble partnership turns away with a tearful goodbye.

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful... You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn’t changed: you have.

I wasn’t an active feminist in the ’60s, never have been.

She was surprised, in short, that athletes were not intellectual, for somewhere within her was still a notion that famous people must necessarily be brilliant in every way.

And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laughs, and he calls his wife and says: Look, we are seeing something that ceased to exist millions of years ago – and she sees, exactly, and laughs with him.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn’t seem to lessen their horrors.

In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

There is absolutely nothing like love for showing how many different people can live inside one skin.