Top 300 Doris Lessing Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “How boring these emotions are that we’re caught in and can’t get free of, no matter how much we want to...”

— Doris Lessing

152. “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

153. “I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.”

— Doris Lessing

154. “When a book’s pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author – then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.”

— Doris Lessing

155. “For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.”

— Doris Lessing

156. “I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.”

— Doris Lessing

157. “When you’re young you think that you’re going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.”

— Doris Lessing

158. “Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.”

— Doris Lessing

159. “My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.”

— Doris Lessing

160. “At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.”

— Doris Lessing

161. “There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”

— Doris Lessing

162. “Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.”

— Doris Lessing

163. “I don’t think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It’s only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time 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

164. “I’m always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.”

— Doris Lessing

165. “I don’t know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate.”

— Doris Lessing

166. “Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.”

— Doris Lessing

167. “Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions – and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas – can’t be yours alone.”

— Doris Lessing

168. “You have to deduce a person’s real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth’s corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.”

— Doris Lessing

169. “When old settlers say ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native.’ They are saying in effect, ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don’t want you.’”

— Doris Lessing

170. “Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.”

— Doris Lessing

171. “As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.”

— Doris Lessing

172. “Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.”

— Doris Lessing

173. “There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don’t.”

— Doris Lessing

174. “My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.”

— Doris Lessing

175. “Women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create a man.”

— Doris Lessing

176. “I have you for being normal, I hate you for it. You’re a normal human being. What right have you to that?”

— Doris Lessing

177. “Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.”

— Doris Lessing

178. “I’ve always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.”

— Doris Lessing

179. “She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl’s genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.”

— Doris Lessing

180. “There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.”

— Doris Lessing

181. “You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.”

— Doris Lessing

182. “There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag.”

— Doris Lessing

183. “I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes – of course, there are thousands. It’s a very talented city.”

— Doris Lessing

184. “If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let’s make a foursome!”

— Doris Lessing

185. “They can’t give a Nobel to someone who’s dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.”

— Doris Lessing

186. “The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.”

— Doris Lessing

187. “I wasn’t an active feminist in the ’60s, never have been.”

— Doris Lessing

188. “No one’s noticed. So much is destroyed, we can’t be bothered.”

— Doris Lessing

189. “Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.”

— Doris Lessing

190. “My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.”

— Doris Lessing

191. “Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And.”

— Doris Lessing

192. “My father was in the First World War.”

— Doris Lessing

193. “He had decided not to be angry: it was killing him.”

— Doris Lessing

194. “Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.”

— Doris Lessing

195. “I’m going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I’ve reached the stage where I look at people and say – he or she, they are whole at all because they’ve chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.”

— Doris Lessing

196. “It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.”

— Doris Lessing

197. “An interim report – that is what an autobiography is.”

— Doris Lessing

198. “I never stopped reading.”

— Doris Lessing

199. “They turned into wrong and destructive paths believing that they were better than others whose belief in self-interest was open and expressed, better because they, and they alone, knew how the practical affairs of the planet should be conducted. An emotional reaction to the sufferings of Shikasta seemed to them a sufficient qualification for curing them.”

— Doris Lessing

200. “You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.”

— Doris Lessing