Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dorothy Allison

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

Dorothy Allison

I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.

Dorothy Allison

I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)

Dorothy Allison

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure

Dorothy Allison

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

Doris Lessing

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

Doris Lessing

I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.

Doris Lessing

The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.

Doris Lessing

People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

Doris Lessing

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

Doris Lessing

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

Doris Lessing

Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.

Doris Lessing

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.

Doris Lessing

I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

Doris Lessing

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

Doris Lessing

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along.

Doris Lessing

I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.

Doris Lessing

[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .

Doris Lessing

If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.

Doris Lessing

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

Doris Lessing

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

Donna Summer

I don't keep a press agent because I think people need to have a break from you.

Donna Summer

I don't really try to predict what can and will happen with things. Sometimes you think something's gonna be a huge success, and it isn't. And sometimes you pay no attention to something whatsoever, and God just makes it into everything.

Donna Murphy

I think all villains have something in common: they have something that they need or want very, very badly. The stakes are very high and they are not bound by moral codes or being ethical, so they can do anything and will do anything to get what they want.

Donna Mills

Scarlett O'Hara didn't think she was manipulating. That's just the way she got what she wanted.

Donna Mills

I was seventeen and the star of my high school play. I was supposed to kiss my leading man, but I couldn't stand the guy. I really didn't want to kiss him. All during rehearsals, I refused to kiss him. Then my drama teacher told me, "If you don't kiss him on opening night, you'll flunk drama class. So I kissed him, and that was my first kiss.

Donna Shalala

I have to admit, in January and February I was in an absolute fuzz. I had no one on board. It wasn't that I didn't know what I was doing, but we didn't have all the pieces put together.

Donna Shalala

I think anyone that thought that we were coming in as a bunch of liberal Democrats to deliver more large-scale social programs was nuts. I sure didn't expect it.

Donna Shalala

We know the parental support, community support, makes a difference. It's not just the metrics of testing and putting pressure on the schools and on the teachers.

Donnie Wahlberg

I would like to meet Mikhail Gorbachev. I think it would be great to sit in a room with him...and try to make peace.

Donnie Wahlberg

I love the rush of being creative. I really think I live for it.

Donna Tartt

There's nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you're trying to achieve and only wants to make it better.