That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. - Doris Lessing
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools. - Doris Lessing
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel. - Doris Lessing
It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes. - Doris Lessing
...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see. - Doris Lessing
Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is - Doris Lessing
As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable. - Doris Lessing
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in 70 or 80 years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. - Doris Lessing
Laughter is by definition healthy. - Doris Lessing
Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself. - Doris Lessing
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how. - Doris Lessing
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh. - Doris Lessing
This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them. - Doris Lessing
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot. - Doris Lessing
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so. - Doris Lessing
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. - Doris Lessing