574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

I didn’t go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

You won’t change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.

She was thinking – for, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other way – that all this had been described in Dickens, Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silent – for here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding.

It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

I wonder if you have to spend your whole life suddenly understanding facts that were perfectly obvious all the time.

When old settlers say ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native.’ They are saying in effect, ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don’t want you.’

Not so easy to put flesh and blood on the bones of an intellectual conviction; Martha was remembering with shame the brash and easy way she had said to Joss that she repudiated race prejudice; for the fact was, she could not remember a time when she had not thought of people in terms of groups, nations, or colour of skin first, and as people afterwards.

An interim report – that is what an autobiography is.

For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.