“Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from The Grass is Singing
“If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from The Grass is Singing
“Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from The Grass is Singing
“Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from The Grass is Singing
“The stinting poverty in which they lived was unbearable; it was destroying them. It did not mean that there was not enough to eat: it meant that every penny must be watched, new clothes foregone, amusements abandoned, holidays kept in the never-never-land of the future. A poverty that allows a tiny margin for spending, but which is shadowed always by a weight of debt that nags like a conscience, is worse than starvation itself. That was how she had come to feel. And it was bitter because it was a self imposed poverty.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from The Grass is Singing
“Es terrible destruir la imagen que una persona tiene de sí misma en aras de la verdad o cualquier otra abstracción. ¿Cómo saber si será capaz de crear otra que le permita seguir viviendo?”
― Doris Lessing, quote from The Grass is Singing
“What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from The Grass is Singing
Doris Lessing
Born place: in Kermanshah, Iran
Born date October 22, 1919
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“When you fall out of love, it doesn’t mean that you stop loving someone. They just don’t make your heart beat faster. You don’t crave them until you don’t know where they end and you begin. I don’t know that I ever fell out of love with Ben, but I do know that I fell in love with Arsen along the way. Or maybe I confused fucking and lust for love. I don’t know. I don’t think I will ever know.”
― Mia Asher, quote from Arsen: A Broken Love Story
“They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“Marcus looked down. “Ah, man! This was my favorite shirt. Who tore it?” he asked, trying to pull the ragged edges together.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“They had to pretend because our high-ranking politician knew not a word of English (well, when he said goodbye he did risk a “Good luck”) and the high-ranking British politician knew not a word of Spanish (although she did say “Buen dίa” to me as she gave me an iron handshake). So while the former was mumbling gibberish in Spanish, inaudible to cameras and photographers, all the time keeping a broad smile trained on his guest, as if he were regaling her with interesting banter (what he said was not, however, inaudible to me: I seem to remember that he kept repeating “One, two, three, four, five, what a lovely time we’re going to have”). The latter was muttering nonsense in her own language, and smiling even more broadly than him (“Cheese,” she kept saying, which is what all English people being photographed are told to say, and then various untranslatable onomatopoeic words such as “Tweedle tweedle, biddle diddle, twit and fiddle, tweedle twang”).”
― Javier Marías, quote from A Heart So White
“Because today after all, is all we knew.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
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