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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.

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
Moving
Bones
Feel
Delight
Upright
Feels
Flesh
Sanity
Easily
Strike
Depends
Heat
Stand
Strikes
Knowing
Skin
Happiness
Skins

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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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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At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
Doris Lessing
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I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
Doris Lessing
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Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
Doris Lessing
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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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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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The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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For there is never any way to go but in.
Doris Lessing