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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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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
Precarious
Collapse
Mechanism
Dependent
Easily
Society
Dicey
Mechanisms

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there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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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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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
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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.
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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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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All things come alike to all there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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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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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
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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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