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What is a hero without love for mankind.

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
Heroic
Hero
Mankind
Without
Love

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What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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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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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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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
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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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What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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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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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
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Curse not the king, no not in thy thought and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
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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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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
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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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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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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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