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

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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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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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What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
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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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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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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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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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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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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
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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 spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.
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