Doris Lessing Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Doris Lessing's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Novelist Doris Lessing's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 328 quotes on this page collected since October 22, 1919! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.

    Doris May Lessing (1992). “Canopus in Argos: Archives”
  • I wonder why do wars suddenly start and suddenly stop, and why do we Brits and you Americans get involved in some of them and not in others? Is it possible that the arms manufacturers quietly foment wars without us knowing? Dropping bombs is a very profitable business for them. Gore Vidal was talking about this the other day, and he made a lot of sense. Whenever American policy seems inscrutable, he said, remember the military-industrial complex. He's the one who should have been President.

    Source: progressive.org
  • All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.

    "An Uncommon Scold". Book by Abby Adams, 1989.
  • The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.

    Doris Lessing (1999). “Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher”, p.34, Canongate Books
  • Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the next century. At least half of them I didn't understand at all, though I'm sure that kids today would know exactly what he meant. I'm somewhere in the past. I do think, however, that our brains have been damaged by technology. I meet kids who don't seem to be capable of reading a long sentence, much less a long book.

    Source: progressive.org
  • Every child has the capacity to be everything.

    Doris Lessing (1979). “Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5 : Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor (George Sherban) Emissary (grade 9) 87th of the Period of the Last Days”
  • What is a hero without love for mankind.

  • What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.

    "The great contrarian". Interview with Lisa Allardice, www.theguardian.com. January 20, 2007.
  • 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 May Lessing (1989). “The Doris Lessing Reader”, Jonathan Cape
  • The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.

    Doris May Lessing (1994). “Under my skin”
  • A story is how we construct our experiences.

  • 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.

    "'I have nothing in common with feminists. They never seem to think that one might enjoy men'". Interview with Barbara Ellen, www.theguardian.com. September 9, 2001.
  • The kitten was six weeks old. It was enchanting, a delicate fairy-tale cat, whose Siamese genes showed in the shape of the face, ears, tail, and the subtle lines of its body. [...] She sat, a tiny thing, in the middle of a yellow carpet, surrounded by five worshipppers, not at all afraid of us. Then she stalked around that floor of the house, inspecting every inch of it, climbed up on to my bed, crept under the fold of a sheet, and was at home.

  • I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.

  • America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.

    Source: progressive.org
  • All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.

    Doris Lessing (1999). “Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher”, p.30, Canongate Books
  • I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.

    "Lay off men, Lessing tells feminists" by Fiachra Gibbons, www.theguardian.com. August 14, 2001.
  • You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.

    Doris May Lessing (1996). “Putting questions differently: interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994”
  • For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

  • When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

    "Damehood. A cosy name that conceals some dubious choices" by Catherine Bennett, www.theguardian.com. January 4, 2015.
  • For there is never any way to go but in.

  • I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

    Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers
  • In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

    Doris May Lessing (1970). “Martha Quest: A Complete Novel”
  • When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

  • 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 (1973). “The Grass is Singing”, p.66, Heinemann
  • I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.

  • 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 (2010). “Stories”, p.494, Vintage
  • Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.

    "Killing Her Softly" by Joseph O'Neil, www.theatlantic.com. September 2010.
  • I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

  • Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 328 quotes from the Novelist Doris Lessing, starting from October 22, 1919! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!