Love Quote by Doris Lessing

Lessing’s line lands like a small slap to the face of sentimental thinking: stop asking the people closest to you to be pure. “Trust no friend without faults” isn’t misanthropy so much as a warning about performance. A faultless friend can read as a friend who’s curating you - polished, strategic, hard to truly know. Flaws are the proof of friction, the evidence that a relationship has survived reality instead of floating above it. In Lessing’s world, the imperfect person is paradoxically the safer bet because they’re less invested in appearing innocent.

The second clause sharpens the blade. “Love a woman, but no angel” doubles as a defense of women and an indictment of the roles they’re forced into. “Angel” evokes the old Victorian fantasy: the woman as moral ornament, domestic saint, a being who exists to redeem others. Lessing refuses that pedestal because it’s just another cage, one that punishes ordinary desire, anger, ambition - the full range of personhood. Loving “a woman” means accepting the human package, not the myth.

The subtext is political as much as personal. Lessing spent her career dismantling cozy narratives about gender and power; she knew how quickly idealization turns into entitlement. When you love an “angel,” you’re not loving her - you’re loving what she does for your self-image. The quote’s intent is bracing realism: intimacy requires accepting mess, and ethics requires resisting the glamorous lie of purity.