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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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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
Focus
Destroys
Future
Continually
Persons
Alternative
Person
Possibilities
Alternatives
Possibility
Numbers
Present
Viewpoints

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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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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's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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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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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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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
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I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
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A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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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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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
Doris Lessing