Disremembered Doris Quotes

#1. If it hasn't already done so, the church ... must recognize that it lives in a pagan society; it must seek for values and norms not shared by society. In short, it will either recover the Christian doctrine of nonconformity or cease to have any authentic Christian voice. #Quote by Doris Janzen Longacre

#2. Some people know Rosa Parks, they know Daisy Bates in Arkansas, but every ... Ruby Doris Smith, Diane Nash, countless individuals. #Quote by John Lewis

#3. Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children. #Quote by Doris Day

#4. I think everything in my life has led to my animal welfare work. #Quote by Doris Day

#5. A hundred things to do, but only one thing to be," he said, obstinately. "But perhaps I don't feel myself worthy of such a wealth of opportunity? #Quote by Doris Lessing

#6. When there's a war, people get married. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#7. I want, freshman Senator Gale McGee wrote to Johnson, to take time to convey to you my deep personal appreciation for the committee assignments. Because of these appointments we freshmen have no alibis if by the end of this session we have failed to produce - in other days I suspect freshmen Senators have been able to excuse their early actions by the heavy hand of the old seniority system - but not now. Your action has given to us both individually and collectively both the responsibility and opportunity #Quote by Doris Kearns Goodwin

#8. War ... strengthened the position of the armament industries ... to a point ... that these industries dominated the economies and therefore the governments of all the participating nations ... war barbarised and lowered the already very low level of accepted conduct. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#9. The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#10. You can only value something if you've experienced it. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#11. Taft generally ate alone. Forever struggling to lose weight, he limited his midday meal to an apple or a glass of water. #Quote by Doris Kearns Goodwin

#12. Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work ... #Quote by Doris Lessing

#13. The person drawn to dance as profession is notoriously unintellectual. He thinks with his muscles, delights in expression with body, not words; finds analysis painful and boring; and is a creature of physical ebullience. #Quote by Doris Humphrey

#14. I am filthy. So is Doris, but we'll bathe and change clothes and be clean. Your filth is within you. If it were gone, you'd collapse. #Quote by Gene Wolfe

#15. You know, The Beach Boys' image is kinda like a group Doris Day, you know what I mean? #Quote by Bruce Johnston

#16. BERNARD. (To DONALD.) Donald, read any new libraries lately?

DONALD. One or three. I did the complete works of Doris Lessing this week. I've been depressed.

[. . .]

BERNARD. Some people eat, some people drink, and some take dope.

DONALD. I read.

MICHAEL. And read and read and read. It's a wonder your eyes don't turn back in your head at the sight of a book jacket.

HANK. Well, at least he's a constructive escapist. #Quote by Mart Crowley

#17. There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#18. According to his habit, Theodore Roosevelt sought to harness anxiety through action. #Quote by Doris Kearns Goodwin

#19. What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month? #Quote by Doris Lessing

#20. The novel had a framework made by thinking. The thought was that to divide off and compartmentalize living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble. Old, young; black, white; men, women; capitalism, socialism; these dichotomies undo us, force us into unreal categorisation, make us look for what separates us rather than what we have in common. That was the thought, which made the shape or pattern of 'The Golden Notebook'. But the emotions were stronger than the thought. This is why I have always seen TGN as a failure: a failure in my terms, of what I had meant. For has this book changed by an iota our tendency to think like computers set to sort everything - people, ideas, history - into boxes? No, it has not. Yet why should I have such a hubristic thought? But I was in the grip of discovery, of revelation. I had only just seen this Truth: I was watching my own mind working like a sorting machine, and I was appalled. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#21. Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have. #Quote by Doris Mortman

#22. (Taft's mother's) losing her firstborn had convinced her that children are treasures lent not given and that they may be recalled at any time. Parents, she firmly believed, could never love their children too much. #Quote by Doris Kearns Goodwin

#23. Still, Roosevelt noted, it was "not always easy to strike the just middle," and he inevitably made mistakes. #Quote by Doris Kearns Goodwin

#24. If I'd find a dog, I'd try to find the owner, of course, but it was mine! I just can't live without them; I love them so much. I have cats, too. People call me all the time and say, 'We know of a couple of cats people don't care for,' and I say, 'Bring them!' That's it - two words. I'm always open for that. #Quote by Doris Day

#25. On a hot summer night in July 1836, an organized mob broke into the shop where the abolitionist weekly was printed, dismantled the press, and tore up the edition that was about to be circulated. #Quote by Doris Kearns Goodwin

#26. (Lincoln reflecting on) George Washington's words: "It is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prospertiy. Washington advised vigilance against "the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts. #Quote by Doris Kearns Goodwin

#27. He believed from the beginning that the heart and soul of an advertising agency is its creative work. #Quote by Doris Willens

#28. The human race has been telling stories since it began. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#29. When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#30. It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#31. Having a book is somewhat like having a baby, as many woman writers have observed before me: the conception, the long preparation, the wait, the growing heaviness (not of body in this case but of the spirit and the manuscript) toward the end, the initial delight at the sight of the product, fully formed and seemingly perfect, and then the usual postpartum depression. What will people whose opinion I care about, and those whose views I don't value but have weight in the world of reader, think of it? #Quote by Doris Grumbach

#32. Y'know, there's a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything's cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don't believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, 'Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time'. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, 'We know that what we're doing is wrong. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#33. I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#34. We are being punished, that's all." "What for?" he demanded, already on guard because there was a tone in her voice he hated. "For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would be. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#35. Where's the progress that we're going to see in Afghanistan? You have to keep public support both on the economy and the war or these things will really become troubling. #Quote by Doris Kearns Goodwin

#36. A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#37. Humor is imperative, more important than food. You have a choice when someone dies. You can lie down or get back into life. Do something for someone else. #Quote by Doris Roberts

#38. Children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again.
Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.
But all the pressures go the other way, towards learning what is immediately useful, what is functional. More and more the demand is for people to be educated to function in an almost certainly temporary stage of technology. Educated for the short term. #Quote by Doris Lessing