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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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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
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All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.
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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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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
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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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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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