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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.

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
Says
Women
Adventurous
Men
Restless
Current
Ideology
Currents
Despite
Conservative

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All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.
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I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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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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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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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.
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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
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September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
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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 Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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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 simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
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