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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
Southern
British
Bits
Found
Young
Rhodesia
Best
Undo
Empire
Empires

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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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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
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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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What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
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It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
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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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It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
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