Doris Lessing Quotes

The way I see it, a clever cat prowls but calls home occasionally.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

We never had books at home, but my dad, seeing how keen I was to read, took me to Islington Library when I was about eight and we pulled out two - a Biggles and a science fiction novel. I never got the ace fighter pilot but fell in love with all things to do with the future and space. Isaac Asimov soon became my guiding star.

An ordinary kitten will ask more questions than any five-year-old.

The most inspiring objects are books. I have about 5,000 volumes in my home library. It's an unending source of visuals and ideas.

I love grocery shopping when I'm home. That's what makes me feel totally normal. I love both the idea of home as in being with my family and friends, and also the idea of exploration. I think those two are probably my great interests.

I remember distinctly running through my neighborhood, thinking I knew how to get to 'Sesame Street,' and then finally finding myself among some scrub trees and realizing I don't know where to go from here. I had to just mope back home.

If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.

I've never quite understood that feeling: that you arrive in a strange place, yet you want to have nothing but familiar experiences.

How much a dunce that has been sent to roam, excels a dunce that has been kept at home.

When I learn something new - and it happens every day - I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest.

When I was in elementary school, I was very interested in science already. I must have been ten or eleven years old. I started experiments with chemistry sets at my home in Mexico. I was able to borrow a bathroom and convert it to a laboratory. My parents supported it. They were pleased. My friends just tolerated it.

The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.

Hollywood was possible for a while! Why didn't I go along with it? Well, the other things that were pulling me back were more important. Being at home, being in the same marriage, these things enabled me to go off and travel in the first place.

I'm not squeamish at all. As a child I dragged a dead squirrel home on my skateboard and cut it open and tried to look at its brain.

Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.

A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is a vagabond.

I'm one of the most adaptable guys I know in as much as travelling is my favourite thing to do in life. With every place I go, I try to stay there long enough to do it justice, long enough so that I can at least imagine what it would be like to live there. Once I imagine that, then it's OK for me to return home.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

A lot of the attitude I used to have about being from New York when I was younger just disappeared when I started to the rest of the world.

Some people will stay at home and be content there. Others are born to run. It's that conflict that fascinates me.

As a child, I had always wanted to know what lay at the end of a corridor or behind a door in a picture, so I did a floorplan and elevations of Angelina's house and learned my way around it. The idea was that children should start to feel at home in it.

In the pathway of the sun, In the footsteps of the breeze, Where the world and sky are one, He shall ride the silver seas, He shall cut the glittering wave. I shall sit at home, and rock; Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock; Brew my tea, and snip my thread; Bleach the linen for my bed. They will call him brave.

Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.

Knowledge is Power. Ignorance is Bliss. But curiosity—even if it had killed the cat—is king.