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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
Empires
Southern
British
Bits
Found
Young
Rhodesia
Best
Undo
Empire

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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.
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When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
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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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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
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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 have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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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.
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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.
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There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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