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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

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
School
Much
Taught
Knew
Reading
Didn

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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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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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
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Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
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I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
Doris Lessing
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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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.
Doris Lessing
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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
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A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
Doris Lessing
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When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
Doris Lessing