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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

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
Lending
Borrowing
Begging
Stealing
Interest
Better
Much

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When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
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What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
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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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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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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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At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.
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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
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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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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
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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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This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
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