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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

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
Goes
Says
Common
Comes
Dogmatists
Experience
Feminists
Sense
Ideology
Life
Feminist
Hated

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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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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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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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You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
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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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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
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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 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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All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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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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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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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
Doris Lessing
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But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
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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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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
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