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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

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
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More quotes by Doris Lessing

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The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Better Counsel comes overnight.
Doris Lessing
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
Doris Lessing
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
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Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
Doris Lessing
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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
Doris Lessing
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
Doris Lessing
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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing
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I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?
Doris Lessing
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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
Doris Lessing
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I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
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Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing