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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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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
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When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
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It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
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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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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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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
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There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
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What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
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There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
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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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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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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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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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What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
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Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
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