Doris Lessing

I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains

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.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day, and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna, said: Today I got up at seven, cooked breakfast for Janet, sent her to school, etc. etc., and felt as if I had saved that day from chaos. Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing. I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing. Words mean nothing. They have become, when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experience. Or like the sound track of a film that has slipped its connection with the film. When I am thinking I have only to write a phrase like __ walked down the street_, or take a phrase from a newspaper, __conomic measures which lead to the full use of _ and immediately the words dissolve, and my minds starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems like a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images. So I can__ write any longer. Or only when I write fast, without looking back at what I have written. For if I look back, then the words swim and have no sense and I am conscious only of me, Anna, as a pulse in a great darkness, and the words that I, Anna, write down are nothing, or like the secretions of a caterpillar that are forced out in ribbons to harden in the air.

Literature is analysis after the event.

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next d

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our heart in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in each other's faces like snowballs, or cricket balls (How's that?) or, more accurately, like great bleeding wounds: "Take my wound". Because the last thing one ever thinks at such moments is that he (or she) will say: Take my wound, please remove the spear from my side. No, not at all; one simply expects to get rid of one's one.

Oh, I simply can__ 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

I__ not going to be like my mother. You__e maniacs. You__e mad.__es,_ said Kate. __ know it. And so you won__ be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

I__ not going to be like my mother. You__e maniacs. You__e mad."__es,_ said Kate. __ know it. And so you won__ be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

Younger woman says, ____ not going to be like my mother. You__e maniacs. You__e mad.___es,_ [older woman responds] __ know it. And so you won__ be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

It__ a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won__ accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won__ accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she ws in now could be got through quickly, for it was seeming to her interminable. If life had to be looked at in terms of high moments or peaks, then nothing had "happened" to her for a long time; and she could look forward to nothing but a dwindling away from full household activities and getting old.