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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.

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
Anything
Dancing
Cynicism
Nothing
Private
Showed
Time
Anybody
Lightning
Emotional
Tragic
Went
Landscape
Wrong
Unhappy
Moments
Misery
Flashed
Change
Ugly
Coloured

More quotes by 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.
Doris Lessing
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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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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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
Doris Lessing
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I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
Doris Lessing
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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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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.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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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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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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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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 treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
Doris Lessing
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing