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

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
Doris Lessing
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For there is never any way to go but in.
Doris Lessing
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Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
Doris Lessing
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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
Doris Lessing
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Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
Doris Lessing
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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
Doris Lessing
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Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
Doris Lessing
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
Doris Lessing
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I never stopped reading.
Doris Lessing
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
Doris Lessing
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At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
Doris Lessing
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Doris Lessing