We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like. Doris Lessing More Quotes by Doris Lessing More Quotes From Doris Lessing Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure. Doris Lessing hate important years I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others. Doris Lessing san-francisco needs thinking if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand. Doris Lessing forgiveness forgiving ifs I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. Doris Lessing perspective people looks The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it. Doris Lessing kissing secret people Intelligence forbids tears. Doris Lessing intelligence tears ... if you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies. Doris Lessing fantasy ifs dream The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire. Doris Lessing small-town towns art This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes. Doris Lessing shapes joy song Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy. Doris Lessing dialect development association Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask. Doris Lessing towns self mean When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new. Doris Lessing patterns shapes book What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows. Doris Lessing phases terrible life London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They're always eating out, and when they're at home they don't cook the way they did ten years ago. They're all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by. Doris Lessing coffee drinking home Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers. Doris Lessing spendthrift courtiers passion We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate. Doris Lessing stars may mean When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence? Doris Lessing forever believe years Writers do not come out of houses without books. Doris Lessing reading house book The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down. Doris Lessing views white dark You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering. Doris Lessing remember
