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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.

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
Terrible
Goes
Wasn
Happened
History
Ira
Back
September
Americans

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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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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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She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
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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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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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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
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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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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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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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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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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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What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
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With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
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The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
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But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
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