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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.

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
Bits
Found
Young
Rhodesia
Best
Undo
Empire
Empires
Southern
British

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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
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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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I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?
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