Doris Lessing Quotes

People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

Happy memories … need to be put in context. I have interviewed many white people who have fond memories of their lives in the 1950s and early 1960s. The ones who never cross examined these memories to get at the complexities were the ones most hostile to the Civil Rights and the Women’s Movements, which they saw as destroying the harmonious world they remembered.

The old horse is coming back in a high lope. Thousands of people are riding a horse today that five years ago couldn't sit in a Ford with all the doors locked.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.

Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

Was there ever a time when the majority was right?

The power of the media is really the only new issue in the last 50 years, probably.

Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago,“ has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday.

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

I'm appalled at how many people my age, or even five or ten years younger, have no tangible memories of important history that happened when we were growing up.

The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.

We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.

Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.

Pretending the past doesn't exist is as bad as living in it.