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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
People
Books
Disappeared
Literature
Respected
Society
Ordinary
Doesn
Realize
Past
Respect
Book
Serious
Whole
Learning
Much
Realizing
More quotes by Doris Lessing
What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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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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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
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I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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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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I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
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Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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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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What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
Doris Lessing
Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
Doris Lessing
I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
Doris Lessing
The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
Doris Lessing
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing