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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

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
Recognition
Meant
Design
Conditions
Impossible
Whatever
Always

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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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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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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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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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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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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.
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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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Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
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Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.
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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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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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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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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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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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This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
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