Top 300 Doris Lessing Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that ‘nothing succeeds like success.’”

— Doris Lessing

202. “I write because I’ve always written, can’t stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.”

— Doris Lessing

203. “It is individuals who change societies, give birth to ideas, who, standing out against tides of opinions, change them. This is as true in open societies as it is in oppressive societies.”

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

206. “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

207. “The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.”

— Doris Lessing

208. “Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it’s not my world.”

— Doris Lessing

209. “Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.”

— Doris Lessing

210. “Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing.”

— Doris Lessing

211. “I think kids ought to travel. I think it’s very good to carry kids around. It’s good for them. Of course it’s tough on the parents.”

— Doris Lessing

212. “The point is, it seems to me that my mind is a mass of totally contradictory attitudes about everything.’ ‘Everyone’s mind is a mass of contradictory attitudes. Why should it matter?’ ‘It should matter to us, surely?”

— Doris Lessing

213. “I didn’t go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.”

— Doris Lessing

214. “We, as a society, can’t tolerate very much difference.”

— Doris Lessing

215. “Your fascinating admirer waits here for you,’ said Donovan, indicating a vacant and grass-grown lot at the corner. ‘Yes, Matty dear, when you’ve gone to your virgin bed, he sits here, in his car, watching your room to make sure of your exclusive interest in him – the whole town’s laughing its head off about it,’ he added cruelly, and glanced swiftly sideways to see how she would take it.”

— Doris Lessing

216. “On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn’t discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East.”

— Doris Lessing

217. “For better or worse, we are prepared to experiment with ourselves, to try and be different kinds of people. But you simply submitted to something.”

— Doris Lessing

218. “I’ll be pleased when I’m dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.”

— Doris Lessing

219. “We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I.”

— Doris Lessing

220. “What I had that others didn’t was a capacity for sticking to it.”

— Doris Lessing

221. “A writer is the conscience of the world.”

— Doris Lessing

222. “But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles.”

— Doris Lessing

223. “She could not bear to lie in bed and wait, so she pestered the nurse until she could sit on a veranda, screened by a thick curtain of golden shower from the street, because she could assure herself she was not blind by looking through her glowing eyelids at the light from the sky. She sat there all day, and felt the waves of heat and perfume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But nostalgia for what?”

— Doris Lessing

224. “When there’s a war, people get married.”

— Doris Lessing

225. “There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.”

— Doris Lessing

226. “When she returned to the office, she found that Mr Jasper Cohen had gone abruptly on holiday. His son had been killed in Spain – he had been shot, near Madrid, rather more than a year before; a friend of his had written, on returning safe to England, to tell his father so.”

— Doris Lessing

227. “Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.”

— Doris Lessing

228. “Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.”

— Doris Lessing

229. “I’m not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.”

— Doris Lessing

230. “Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.”

— Doris Lessing

231. “As always he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul.”

— Doris Lessing

232. “The parcel was a book from Joss, entitled The Social Aspect of the Jewish Question, and inside was a note: ‘Dear Matty Quest, This will be good for your soul, so do, do read it. Yours thin-skinnedly, Joss.”

— Doris Lessing

233. “You won’t change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.”

— Doris Lessing

234. “Cats mean kittens, plentiful and frequent.”

— Doris Lessing

235. “I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.”

— Doris Lessing

236. “He looked like his father. That is to say he was a closely-welded, round youth, dark, like his father, with not a trace of Molly’s dash and vivacity. But unlike Richard, whose tenacious obstinacy was open, smouldering in his dark eyes and displayed in every impatient efficient movement, Tommy had a look of being buttoned in, a prisoner of his own nature. He.”

— Doris Lessing

237. “I don’t think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.”

— Doris Lessing

238. “It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.”

— Doris Lessing

239. “We have almost reached a point where if one values democracy, one is denounced as reactionary. I think that this will be one of the attitudes that will be found most fascinating to historians of the future. For one thing, the young people who cultivate this attitude towards democracy are usually those who have never experienced its opposite: people who’ve lived under tyranny, value democracy.”

— Doris Lessing

240. “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

241. “Sitting there I had a vision of the world with nations, systems, economic blocks, hardening and consolidating; a world where it would become increasingly ludicrous even to talk about freedom, or the individual conscience.”

— Doris Lessing

242. “Please don’t be alarmed, you’d be surprised how many charming people are walking our streets, the mere ghosts of themselves.”

— Doris Lessing

243. “Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn’t seem to lessen their horrors.”

— Doris Lessing

244. “If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.”

— Doris Lessing

245. “They have not yet evolved into an understanding of their individual selves as merely parts of a whole, first of all humanity, their own species, let alone achieving a conscious knowledge of humanity as part of Nature; plants, animals, birds, insects reptiles, and all these together making a small chord in the Cosmic Harmony.”

— Doris Lessing

246. “You must admit he radiates an atmosphere of the suburbs. Odd. But they all do – I mean those tycoons, they all did. One could positively see the labour-saving devices and the kiddies all in their slumber-wear, coming down to kiss daddy good night. Bloody complacent swine they all are.”

— Doris Lessing

247. “You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.”

— Doris Lessing

248. “The tale must be rehearsed–and we may amuse ourselves imagining how these must have been, often, acrimonious, or at least in dispute. Whose version of events is going to be committed to memory by the Memories?”

— Doris Lessing

249. “Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?” “Yes,” Ted had said. “Then I can’t help you,” Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy.”

— Doris Lessing

250. “When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.”

— Doris Lessing