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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

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
Learning
Law
Greater
Fools
Tell
Tolerate
Part
Memorable
University
Fool
College

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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.
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I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
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All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.
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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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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.
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We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
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All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.
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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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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
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Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
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