Ryan Floysand > Ryan's Quotes

“A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.”
― Mark Twain

“So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook?
Sometimes it ought to be.
Sometimes it is.”
― Doris Lessing, Play with a tiger

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”
― Charles Bukowski and Carl Weissner

“We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.”
― Doris Lessing

“you boys can keep your virgins
give me hot old women in high heels
with asses that forgot to get old.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“We are all creatures of the stars.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.”
― Doris Lessing

“Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.”
― Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing

“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
― Charles Bukowski

“There is only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best”
― Doris Lessing

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.”
― Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage

“The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“I don’t say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could”
― Oscar Wilde

“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.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“Some things are too important to be taken seriously.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.”
― Oscar Wilde

“As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.”
― Doris Lessing

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

“nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”
― Oscar Wilde

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
― Doris May Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

“Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook