Doris Lessing Quotes

My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.

Wars never simply end, not for those in combat and not for the culture, and one way or another, they shape-shift from generation to generation.

That's the worst of a war--you have to go on hearing about it so long.

The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

News reports don't look at the land that existed before a war and the land that exists after a war. Reporting on war is a snapshot in time.

I never got away from the war. Not because I was obsessed with it in those years, but because it was the event of my generation and I started out covering it so I stayed with it.

If we lose this war, all will be lost – the world. If we gain this war, then it is forever; never will it stop; this war is for a whole life.

The memories of the last War will grow dim. The world will get back into the old rut, familiar professions and piety about peace will again soothe us to sleep, and the various countries will once more base their security upon military preparation. So they will all, in the end, find themselves drifting hopelessly upon those currents that make for war...And remember what the next war will be like. The old lines which divide combatants from non-combatants, the weak and the diseased from the strong and the robust, men from women and children, will all be obliterated and civilization itself assailed, and from sea and sky will be brought to a heap of ruins.

We don't really see a lot of war movies about the people that are left behind, dealing with the deaths of those who serve and the sacrifices they make.

If you really want to see the face of war, see the faces of survivors.

If I would be born in New Zealand, maybe, I would never write the Polish Requiem or pieces which were connected with the history of war. But this was my childhood. War was the main subject, and also in our family.

A critical part of our relationship with Laos involves addressing the legacy of war.

Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened.

If you ever see a war," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

The more I've traveled to war zones, the more I'm convinced that the impact and the effects are way beyond anything we can even begin to imagine.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

When a war is over I think it's a cowardly thing to leave the war behind you in minefields that hit women and children and the most vulnerable. Imagine the war is finished and you go to work and there are snipers shooting at you. Imagine taking your kids to the beach and you find that the beach is blowing up beneath you. Like there's nowhere safe.

You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!

War is like any other bad relationship. Of course you want out, but at what price? And perhaps more importantly, once you get out, will you be any better off?" - Quellcrist Falconer

For although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high moral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon both sides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or the ruin of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering and general breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after all other wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had been unprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious to say so.

Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over.