"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way."

- Doris Lessing

"Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible."

- Doris Lessing

"Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider's egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling locks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing."

- Doris Lessing

"With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how."

- Doris Lessing

"A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants."

- Doris Lessing