Martha Quest Quotes

“Yes, my child, you must read. You must read everything that comes your way. It doesn’t matter what you read at first, later you’ll learn discrimination. Schools are no good, Matty, you learn nothing at school. If you want to be anything, you must educate yourself.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“She brought herself to decide she would make an effort to renew that friendship with the Cohens, for there was no one else who could help her. She wanted them to tell her what she must read. For there are two ways of reading: one of them deepens and intensifies what one already knows; from the other, one takes new facts, new views to weave into one’s life. She was saturated with the first, and needed the second. All those books she had borrowed, two years before—she had read them, oh yes; but she had not been ready to receive them.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“Then he said, ‘Well, Matty, we don’t seem to go together at all, do we. I’m simply not broadminded enough for your Jews and your niggers.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“She was thinking—for, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other way—that all this had been described in Dickens, Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silent—for here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her. —BARON CORVO”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“This naked embrace of earth and sky, the sun hard and strong overhead, pulling up moisture from the foliage, from soil, so that the swimming glisten of heat is like a caress made visible, this openness of air, everything visible for leagues, so that the circling hawk (the sun glancing off its wings) seems equipoised between sun and boulder -- this frank embrace between the lifting breast of the the land and the deep blue warmth of the sky is what exiles dream of; it is what they sicken for, now matter how hard they try to shut their minds against the memory of it... Living in town, Martha had forgotten this infinite exchange of earth and sky.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“She was surprised, in short, that athletes were not intellectual, for somewhere within her was still a notion that famous people must necessarily be brilliant in every way.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“When she returned to the office, she found that Mr Jasper Cohen had gone abruptly on holiday. His son had been killed in Spain—he had been shot, near Madrid, rather more than a year before; a friend of his had written, on returning safe to England, to tell his father so.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau—but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“But far within him something cried For the great tragedy to start, The pang in lingering mercy fall And sorrow break upon his heart. —EDWIN MUIR”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“Your fascinating admirer waits here for you,’ said Donovan, indicating a vacant and grass-grown lot at the corner. ‘Yes, Matty dear, when you’ve gone to your virgin bed, he sits here, in his car, watching your room to make sure of your exclusive interest in him—the whole town’s laughing its head off about it,’ he added cruelly, and glanced swiftly sideways to see how she would take it.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“The prisoners were handcuffed together, and it was these hands that caught Martha’s attention: the working hands, clasped together by broad and gleaming steel, held carefully at waist level, steady against the natural movement of swinging arms—the tender dark flesh cautious against the bite of the metal. These people were being taken to the magistrate for being caught at night after curfew, or forgetting to carry one of the passes which were obligatory, or—but there were a dozen reasons, each as flimsy.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“All you girls get married, you have no strength of mind at all. I really do feel that all this sex is overrated, don’t you?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Martha humorously, ‘I haven’t tried yet.’ But he would not accept the humour. He pressed her arm urgently, and looked down into her face and insisted, ‘Well, don’t you think so? All you girls want to be made love to, and really…’ His face faded in disgust.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“They’re a bunch of Jews, too,’ said Donovan gracefully. ‘After knowing me for so long, you should have learned discrimination.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“Why haven’t you been seeing me? A little bird told me that you were all mixed up with the local Reds, and that won’t do you any good, Matty dear. Did you know the police go to their meetings? They’ll put you in prison one of these days.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“Perhaps it is not correct to say that she read it, for unfortunately the number of people who actually read magazines, papers or even books is very small indeed.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“Martha Quest, who thought of herself as so adventurous, so free and unbounded—the fact was, even the idea of picking up a telephone and making herself known to a new person troubled her: she made excuses, she could not do it.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“She kept the books a week, and then returned them on a mail day with the postboy. She also sent a note saying: ‘I wish you would let me have some books about the emancipation of women.’ It was only after the man had left that the request struck her as naïve, a hopeless self-exposure; and she could hardly bear to open the parcel which was sent to her.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“Not so easy to put flesh and blood on the bones of an intellectual conviction; Martha was remembering with shame the brash and easy way she had said to Joss that she repudiated race prejudice; for the fact was, she could not remember a time when she had not thought of people in terms of groups, nations, or colour of skin first, and as people afterwards.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“Her look at him was now as aggressive as his had been. ‘It’s all very well for you, you’re a man,’ she said bitterly, and entirely without coquetry; but he said flippantly, even suggestively, ‘It will be all quite well for you too!”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“The parcel was a book from Joss, entitled The Social Aspect of the Jewish Question, and inside was a note: ‘Dear Matty Quest, This will be good for your soul, so do, do read it. Yours thin-skinnedly, Joss.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“Similarly, when Mr Quest complained about the international ring of Jews who controlled the world (which he had taken to doing lately, after reading some pamphlet sent to him through the post), Martha argued against him, in the most reasonable and logical manner; for one does not learn so young that against some things reason is powerless. And when Mrs Quest said that all the kaffirs were dirty and lazy and inherently stupid, she defended them.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“So here was Martha at home, ‘resting her eyes’ but reading as much as ever. And how curious were the arguments between the two women over this illogical behaviour. For Mrs Quest did not say, ‘You are supposed to have strained your eyes, why are you reading?’ She made such remarks as ‘You do it on purpose to upset me!’ Or ‘Why do you have to read that kind of book?’ Or ‘You are ruining your whole life, and you won’t take my advice.’ Martha maintained a stubborn but ironical silence, and continued to read.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“She could not bear to lie in bed and wait, so she pestered the nurse until she could sit on a veranda, screened by a thick curtain of golden shower from the street, because she could assure herself she was not blind by looking through her glowing eyelids at the light from the sky. She sat there all day, and felt the waves of heat and perfume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But nostalgia for what?”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“She put that book down and picked up Ellis. Now, it is hardly possible to be bored by a book on sex when one is fifteen, but she was restless because this collection of interesting facts seemed to have so little to do with her own problems.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“There were occasional cold moments when she thought that she must somehow, even now, check herself on the fatal slope towards marriage, somewhere at the back of her mind was the belief that she would never get married, there would be time to change her mind later. And then the thought of what would happen if she did chilled her.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“Martha’s heart was beating wildly for several reasons. No one had ever tried to put his hand up her skirt before, and she was petrified at the wild driving. She looked confused and alarmed; and the old Scotsman decided to see her as the little girl he had known for years. He took a ten-shilling note from his stuffed wallet, and gave it to her. ‘For when you go back to school,’ he said bluffly.”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

“Jonathan Quest, the younger brother, came home for the holidays from his expensive school, like a visitor from a more prosperous world. For the first time, Martha found herself consciously resenting him. Why, she asked herself, was it that he, with half her brains, should be sent to a ‘good school’, why was it he should inevitably be given the advantages?”
― Doris Lessing, Martha Quest