{"author":"Doris Lessing","author_id":"Doris+Lessing","total_quotes":101,"quotes":[{"text":"Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.","author":"Doris Lessing","tags":["age","books","reading"],"id":1287,"author_id":"Doris+Lessing"},{"text":"Think wrongly  if you please  but in all cases think for yourself.","author":"Doris Lessing","tags":["thinking","thought"],"id":6570,"author_id":"Doris+Lessing"},{"text":"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.","author":"Doris Lessing","tags":["feminism","marriage","men","relationships","women"],"id":6759,"author_id":"Doris+Lessing"},{"text":"The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.","author":"Doris Lessing","tags":["change","great","changes "],"id":6838,"author_id":"Doris+Lessing"},{"text":"Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.","author":"Doris Lessing","tags":["learning","politics"],"id":19301,"author_id":"Doris+Lessing"},{"text":"THE LILIESThis morning it was, on the pavement, When that smell hit me again And set the houses reeling. People passed like rain: (The way rain moves and advances over the hills) And it was hot, hot and dank, The smell like animals, strong, but sweet too. What was it? Something I had forgotten. I tried to remember, standing there, Sniffing the air on the pavement. Somehow I thought of flowers. Flowers! That bad smell! I looked: down lanes, past houses--There, behind a hoarding, A rubbish-heap, soft and wet and rotten. Then I remembered: After the rain, on the farm, The vlei that was dry and paler than a stone Suddenly turned wet and green and warm. The green was a clash of music. Dry Africa became a swamp And swamp-birds with long beaks Went humming and flashing over the reeds And cicadas shrilling like a train. I took off my clothes and waded into the water. Under my feet first grass, then mud, Then all squelch and water to my waist. A faint iridescence of decay, The heat swimming over the creeks Where the lilies grew that I wanted: Great lilies, white, with pink streaks That stood to their necks in the water. Armfuls I gathered, working there all day. With the green scum closing round my waist, The little frogs about my legs, And jelly-trails of frog-spawn round the stems. Once I saw a snake, drowsing on a stone, Letting his coils trail into the water. I expect he was glad of rain too After nine moinths of being dry as bark. I don't know why I picked those lilies, Piling them on the grass in heaps, For after an hour they blackened, stank. When I left at dark, Red and sore and stupid from the heat, Happy as if I'd built a town, All over the grass were rank Soft, decaying heaps of lilies And the flies over them like black flies on meat...","author":"Doris Lessing","tags":["africa","childhood","flowers","nature"],"id":24407,"author_id":"Doris+Lessing"},{"text":"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.","author":"Doris Lessing","tags":["marriage","midlife-crisis"],"id":26052,"author_id":"Doris+Lessing"},{"text":"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.","author":"Doris Lessing","tags":["future","novel","writing"],"id":31489,"author_id":"Doris+Lessing"},{"text":"For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.","author":"Doris Lessing","tags":["life","work","always "],"id":31708,"author_id":"Doris+Lessing"},{"text":"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.","author":"Doris Lessing","tags":["idealism","revolution","success"],"id":35158,"author_id":"Doris+Lessing"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":101,"pages":11,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}