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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

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You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
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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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The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
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I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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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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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
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With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
Doris Lessing
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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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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.
Doris Lessing
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I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
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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.
Doris Lessing
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The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
Doris Lessing