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You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.

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
Ideas
Disappeared
Ever
Empire
Like
Empires
British
Absolutely
Idea
Girl
Ends
Inconceivable

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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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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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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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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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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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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
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I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
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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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She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
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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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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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All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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