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

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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
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In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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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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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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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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Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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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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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
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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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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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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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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
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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.
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