Top 300 Doris Lessing Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.”

— Doris Lessing

52. “I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.”

— Doris Lessing

53. “I don’t think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.”

— Doris Lessing

54. “This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there’s a layer of people who run everything. But we – we’re just peasants. We don’t understand what’s going on, and we can’t do anything.”

— Doris Lessing

55. “What matters most is that we learn from living.”

— Doris Lessing

56. “I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married.”

— Doris Lessing

57. “Writers do not come out of houses without books.”

— Doris Lessing

58. “For there is never any way to go but in.”

— Doris Lessing

59. “Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares...”

— Doris Lessing

60. “People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.”

— Doris Lessing

61. “What you don’t understand is, people never believe these things. Not until they experience them. Then when they experience them they become people other people don’t believe. Hard lines.”

— Doris Lessing

62. “We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.”

— Doris Lessing

63. “Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same – to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.”

— Doris Lessing

64. “It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.”

— Doris Lessing

65. “I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.”

— Doris Lessing

66. “Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.”

— Doris Lessing

67. “Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.”

— Doris Lessing

68. “Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

— Doris Lessing

69. “I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.”

— Doris Lessing

70. “It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.”

— Doris Lessing

71. “A story is how we construct our experiences.”

— Doris Lessing

72. “What society doesn’t realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don’t now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.”

— Doris Lessing

73. “One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.”

— Doris Lessing

74. “Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

— Doris Lessing

75. “There’s an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.”

— Doris Lessing

76. “It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.”

— Doris Lessing

77. “As you get older, you don’t get wiser. You get irritable.”

— Doris Lessing

78. “Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.”

— Doris Lessing

79. “So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.”

— Doris Lessing

80. “Humanity’s legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.”

— Doris Lessing

81. “Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.”

— Doris Lessing

82. “Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroyeth much good.”

— Doris Lessing

83. “Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.”

— Doris Lessing

84. “Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”

— Doris Lessing

85. “In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.”

— Doris Lessing

86. “The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.”

— Doris Lessing

87. “Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one’s self behind a mask.”

— Doris Lessing

88. “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

89. “Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people’s company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.”

— Doris Lessing

90. “What’s terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.”

— Doris Lessing

91. “Every child has the capacity to be everything.”

— Doris Lessing

92. “You can’t be a Red if you’re married to a civil servant.”

— Doris Lessing

93. “Women are slaves to their beauty.”

— Doris Lessing

94. “The words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.”

— Doris Lessing

95. “Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.”

— Doris Lessing

96. “A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.”

— Doris Lessing

97. “When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.”

— Doris Lessing

98. “Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.”

— Doris Lessing

99. “There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.”

— Doris Lessing

100. “Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.”

— Doris Lessing