“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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“The government," he told me one night, "is there to act as a safety net, not a candy machine.”
― Glenn Beck, quote from The Christmas Sweater
“I have repeatedly seen how people are poor at articulating what they want—until they see a work centre doing something they don't want them to do.”
― A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, quote from Wings of Fire: An Autobiography
“Man sets his hand to games of power and influence, he quests for far horizons and wealth beyond imagining. He thinks to own what cannot be possessed. He hews the ancient trees to broaden his grazing lands; he mines the deep caves and topples the standing stones. He embraces a new faith with fervor and, perhaps, with sincerity. But he grows ever further from the old things. He can no longer hear the heartbeat of the earth, his mother. He cannot smell the change in the air; he cannot see what lies beyond the veil of shadows. Even his new god is formed in his own image, for do they not call him the son of man? By his own choice he is cut adrift from the ancient cycles of sun and moon, the ordered passing of the seasons. And without him, the Fair Folk dwindle and are nothing. They retreat and hide themselves, and are reduced to the clurichaun with his little ale jug; the brownie who steals the cow's milk at Samhain; the half-heard wailing of the banshee. They become no more than a memory in the mind of a frail old man; a tale told by a crazy old woman.”
― Juliet Marillier, quote from Child of the Prophecy
“The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.”
― Carson McCullers, quote from The Member of the Wedding
“I have been beaten here,
locked away,
violated a hundred times,
and a hundred times more.
I have been starved,
and cheated,
tricked
and disgraced.
How odd is it that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil.”
― Patricia McCormick, quote from Sold
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