Top 300 Doris Lessing Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I’m sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what’s going on in the world.”

— Doris Lessing

252. “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

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

— Doris Lessing

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “We hope that your period of immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and stupid ideas into practice. “If you are lucky, you will emerge much enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white.”

— Doris Lessing

258. “And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laughs, and he calls his wife and says: Look, we are seeing something that ceased to exist millions of years ago – and she sees, exactly, and laughs with him.”

— Doris Lessing

259. “The young often have moments of clear thinking, which as they grow older become fewer, and muddied. He had kept alive in some part of him a knowledge that he was “destined” to do something or other. He felt this as pure and unsullied, but – more often and more deeply as he grew older – “impractical”.”

— Doris Lessing

260. “The things that are important in life creep up on one unawared, one doesn’t expect them, one hasn’t given them shape in one’s mind. One recognizes them, when they’ve appeared, that’s all.”

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

262. “Yes, it’s because it’s one thing to think poor things and another to allow that African politics could have any resemblance at all to English politics – even such a long time ago.”

— Doris Lessing

263. “These might work, fight, even commit crimes to get “their” representatives into power, but after that they did not consider they had any responsibility for their choices. For a feature, perhaps a predominant feature of the inhabitants of this planet, was that their broken minds allowed them to hold, and act on – even forcibly and violently – opinions and sets of mind that a short time later – years, a month, even a few minutes – they might utterly repudiate.”

— Doris Lessing

264. “Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.”

— Doris Lessing

265. “Yes, my child, you must read. You must read everything that comes your way. It doesn’t matter what you read at first, later you’ll learn discrimination. Schools are no good, Matty, you learn nothing at school. If you want to be anything, you must educate yourself.”

— Doris Lessing

266. “Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.”

— Doris Lessing

267. “Why haven’t you been seeing me? A little bird told me that you were all mixed up with the local Reds, and that won’t do you any good, Matty dear. Did you know the police go to their meetings? They’ll put you in prison one of these days.”

— Doris Lessing

268. “The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.”

— Doris Lessing

269. “There’s always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they’re usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.”

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

271. “But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: ‘Of course I know nothing about German literature.’ It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.”

— Doris Lessing

272. “They’re a bunch of Jews, too,’ said Donovan gracefully. ‘After knowing me for so long, you should have learned discrimination.”

— Doris Lessing

273. “The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her. – BARON CORVO.”

— Doris Lessing

274. “There is absolutely nothing like love for showing how many different people can live inside one skin.”

— Doris Lessing

275. “Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born – and yet in each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from his low half-animal state to true humanity. Each one of them with this potential, and yet so few can be reached, to make the leap.”

— Doris Lessing

276. “She was thinking – for, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other way – that all this had been described in Dickens, Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silent – for here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding.”

— Doris Lessing

277. “Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment.”

— Doris Lessing

278. “But far within him something cried For the great tragedy to start, The pang in lingering mercy fall And sorrow break upon his heart. – EDWIN MUIR.”

— Doris Lessing

279. “I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.”

— Doris Lessing

280. “Her look at him was now as aggressive as his had been. ‘It’s all very well for you, you’re a man,’ she said bitterly, and entirely without coquetry; but he said flippantly, even suggestively, ‘It will be all quite well for you too!”

— Doris Lessing

281. “In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful... You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.”

— Doris Lessing

282. “But all the pressures go the other way, towards learning only what is immediately useful, what is functional. More and more the demand is for people to be educated to function in an almost certainly temporary stage of technology. Educated for the short term.”

— Doris Lessing

283. “I wonder if you have to spend your whole life suddenly understanding facts that were perfectly obvious all the time.”

— Doris Lessing

284. “Not so easy to put flesh and blood on the bones of an intellectual conviction; Martha was remembering with shame the brash and easy way she had said to Joss that she repudiated race prejudice; for the fact was, she could not remember a time when she had not thought of people in terms of groups, nations, or colour of skin first, and as people afterwards.”

— Doris Lessing

285. “Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is.”

— Doris Lessing

286. “Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work...”

— Doris Lessing

287. “The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.”

— Doris Lessing

288. “Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the ‘Anna’ of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.”

— Doris Lessing

289. “For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.”

— Doris Lessing

290. “Perhaps it is not correct to say that she read it, for unfortunately the number of people who actually read magazines, papers or even books is very small indeed.”

— Doris Lessing

291. “All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.”

— Doris Lessing

292. “We live in an open society. We pride ourselves on it, and so we should. An open society is distinguished by the fact that government may not keep information from its citizens, must allow the circulation of ideas. But what we have, we take for granted. What we are used to, we cease to value. Generations of our forebears fought for the freedom of ideas, so that we may have what we do have.”

— Doris Lessing

293. “After a certain age – and for some of us that can be very young – there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before...”

— Doris Lessing

294. “September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible.”

— Doris Lessing

295. “One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel – the quality of philosophy.”

— Doris Lessing

296. “We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we’re moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who’s to stop it – us?”

— Doris Lessing

297. “Even the most sketchily educated and ill-informed youngster had at his or her fingertips facts that had to contradict, in all kinds of ways, obvious and implicit, the propagandas which afflicted them.”

— Doris Lessing

298. “My brain contains so much that is locked up and unreachable.”

— Doris Lessing

299. “While the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are amoung the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, color predjudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.”

— Doris Lessing

300. “Y’know, there’s a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything’s cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don’t believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, ‘Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time’. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, ‘We know that what we’re doing is wrong.”

— Doris Lessing