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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

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
Writing
World
Messed
War
Write
Mother
Wanted

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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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There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.
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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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You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
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This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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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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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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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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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.
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The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
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The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
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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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When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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