Doris Lessing Quotes

To be in love with a country or a political regime is a tricky business. You get your heart broken even more surely than by being in love with a person.

It does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, ‘Without me the literary industry would not exist’.

Briefing for a Descent into Hell.

But this novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.

It occurred to her that she was going mad… Yet it did not seem to her that she was even slightly mad; but rather that people who were not as obsessed as she was with the inchoate world mirrored in the newspapers were all out of touch with an awful necessity.

Martha and Jasmine smiled at each other…the future they dreamed of seemed just around the corner; they could almost touch it. Each saw an ideal town, clean, noble and beautiful, soaring up over the actual town they saw, which consisted in this area of sordid little shops and third-rate cafes.