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

- Doris Lessing

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

- Doris Lessing

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real demo…

- Doris Lessing

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at …

- Doris Lessing

People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

- Doris Lessing

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutalit…

- Doris Lessing

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

- Doris Lessing

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our e…

- Doris Lessing

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

- Doris Lessing