Top 300 Doris Lessing Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 7

51. “In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.”

— Doris Lessing

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

52. “Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.”

— Doris Lessing

53. “For women like me, integrity isn’t chastity, it isn’t fidelity, it isn’t any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven’t any control over.”

— Doris Lessing

54. “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot.”

— Doris Lessing

55. “What the feminists want of me is something they haven’t examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.”

— Doris Lessing

56. “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

57. “It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.”

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

59. “This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.”

— Doris Lessing

60. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

67. “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

68. “We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.”

— Doris Lessing

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

80. “Choose? When do I ever choose? Have I ever chosen?”

— Doris Lessing

81. “Is there any delight as great as the child’s discovering ability?”

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

83. “We need a shape for the tale. A beginning, a middle and an end.”

— Doris Lessing

84. “Half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine.”

— Doris Lessing

85. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

89. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

96. “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

97. “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

98. “What I did have, which others perhaps didn’t, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.”

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing