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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

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
Women
Appalling
Mothers
Inspiring
Friends
Mother

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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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It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
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I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
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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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Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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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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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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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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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
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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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The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
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When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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