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

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
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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 smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
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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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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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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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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.
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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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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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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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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 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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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
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