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What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

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
Society
Ordinary
Doesn
Realize
Past
Respect
Book
Serious
Whole
Learning
Much
Realizing
People
Books
Disappeared
Literature
Respected

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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
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Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
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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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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
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America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
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It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.
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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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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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I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?
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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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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing