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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.
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
Usually
Lives
Living
Sense
Incredulity
Feel
Flat
Feels
Flats
Always
Writers
Ordinary
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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.
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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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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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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.
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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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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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I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
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[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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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.
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
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Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
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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.
Doris Lessing