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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

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
Way
Novels
Time
Emotions
Novel
Emotion
History
Cannot
Flavour
Give
Matrix
Giving
Formal

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
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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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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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I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
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Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
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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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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Doris Lessing