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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
Democratic
Reading
Climates
Free
Librarian
Read
Confined
Tell
Temporary
Political
Library
Book
Institutions
Climate

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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
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Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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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.
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You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
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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.
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It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
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I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
Doris Lessing
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I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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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.
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