“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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“I’m going to follow her, of course,” Magiano says. “As the night sky turns. When she appears on the other side of the world, I will be there, and when she returns here, so will I.”
― Marie Lu, quote from The Midnight Star
“The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilise all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. It”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from Sherlock Holmes: The Ultimate Collection
“I remember him standing under a streetlamp.
'Just as we passed that other lamp I was going to tell you a further thing, Sal, but now I am parenthetically continuing with a new thought and by the time we reach the next I'll return to the original subject, agreed?'
I certainly agreed.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll
“This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm. If anyone should be kind, understanding, accepting, loving to their fellow outcasts, it’s you. All of you. You are the guardians of the secrets of the universe, beloved of worlds that most will never dream of, much less see … can’t you see where you owe it to yourselves to be kind? To care for one another? No one outside this room will ever understand what you’ve been through the way the people around you right now understand.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway
“Provider of moonbeams when I wanted full illumination.”
― Ivan Doig, quote from The Whistling Season
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Lola and the Boy Nex...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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