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You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

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
Simply
Wise
Years
Raving
Cannibal
Etc
Mature
Thirty
Unless

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What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
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Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
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The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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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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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.
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The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
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