Doris Lessing Quotes

You just don't make decisions about what you're going to be like when you are old. I know that I am making that decision right now. Every time we perceive ourselves, others, life, the world and God in a certain way, we are deepening the habits that will take over in old age. Every time I act on the insights that I am getting now I am deciding my future and choosing to be a kindly or cynical old man. Our yesterdays lie heavily upon our todays and our todays will lie heavily upon our tomorrows.

People like to say, "You're only as old as you feel," but it isn't true. It's just something old people say to make themselves feel good about their age. You're as old as you are.

Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.

I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

It is a terrible thing for an old woman to outlive her dogs.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

By [age] 93, I had shrunk quite a lot. My car was known as the Phantom Cadillac. People would see it whizzing by and they would swear there was no driver.

It was formerly a terrifying view to me that I should one day be an old woman. I now find that Nature has provided pleasures for every state.

Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine.

Youth demands more than ordinary life. Age clings to it.

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.

You know you're getting old when you buy a sexy sheer nightgown and don't know anyone who can see through it.

I like old people when they have aged well.

Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

People don't die of old age, they die of neglect.

I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.

There's nothing good about being my age.

That's what happens when people reach old age; nobody remembers they've been bastards too.

I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing old age that it is a time of discovery. If they say "Of what?" I can only answer "We must find out for ourselves, otherwise it wouldn't be discovery."

I was a weird tomboy most of my life. I didn't see the power in my own female form for quite a long time. Maybe that's a good thing.

I see a guy getting old. I try to not look in the mirror too much.

It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things.

What's the worst thing about getting old? Getting old.

I wanted to impress people because I was kind of a kid who was lost in the crowd - was sort of my, feeling about childhood was being part of a big family.