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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
Terms
Inside
Term
Talk
Slap
Labels
Critics
Expect

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
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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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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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
Doris Lessing
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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
Doris Lessing
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I never stopped reading.
Doris Lessing
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All things come alike to all there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
Doris Lessing
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Doris Lessing
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
Doris Lessing
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
Doris Lessing
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I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
Doris Lessing
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Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
Doris Lessing
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
Doris Lessing
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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
Doris Lessing