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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

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
Dream
Like
Recurring
Entered
Dreams
Parents
Needed
Parent
Use

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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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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.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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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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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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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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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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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'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
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There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
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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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Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
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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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You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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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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