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With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
Doris Lessing
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Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Free
Librarian
Read
Confined
Tell
Temporary
Political
Library
Book
Institutions
Climate
Democratic
Reading
Climates
More quotes by Doris Lessing
Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
Doris Lessing
A story is how we construct our experiences.
Doris Lessing
When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.
Doris Lessing
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
Doris Lessing
This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
Doris Lessing
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
Doris Lessing
It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
Doris Lessing
The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
Doris Lessing
What matters most is that we learn from living.
Doris Lessing
Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
Doris Lessing
I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
Doris Lessing
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
Doris Lessing
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
Doris Lessing
My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
Doris Lessing
Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
Doris Lessing
Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
Doris Lessing
We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing