Doris Lessing Women Quotations

You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.

I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.

Women are slaves to their beauty.

There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.