Top 300 Doris Lessing Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.”

— Doris Lessing

152. “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

153. “For many thousands of years people had looked at expensive heads of hair and thought of how much food and warmth they represented, so obviously it was a thought of no use at all, so why bother to have it? But thoughts of this sort did go ticking on, useless or not.”

— Doris Lessing

154. “This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.”

— Doris Lessing

155. “Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative – despite what current ideology says.”

— Doris Lessing

156. “Poor economies breed tyrannies.”

— Doris Lessing

157. “Martha Quest, who thought of herself as so adventurous, so free and unbounded – the fact was, even the idea of picking up a telephone and making herself known to a new person troubled her: she made excuses, she could not do it.”

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

159. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

166. “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

167. “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

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

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

— Doris Lessing

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

194. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

198. “You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.”

— Doris Lessing

199. “I’m very unhappy when I’m not writing.”

— Doris Lessing

200. “She thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don’t know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too close to a fire.”

— Doris Lessing