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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 all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

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
Body
Changed
Eighty
Great
Share
Confusing
Years
Courses
Birthday
Really
Course
Aging
Time
Causes
Confusion
People
Secret
Changes
Seventy
Age
Havens
Elders
Change
Haven
Seventies

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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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.
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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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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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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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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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You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
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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.
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
Doris Lessing
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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
Doris Lessing
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Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
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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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What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
Doris Lessing
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The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
Doris Lessing