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Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

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
Kind
Talk
Really
Wish
Everyone
Thinking
Understand
World
Truth
People
Persons
Person
Telling
Mean
Everybody

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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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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.
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You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
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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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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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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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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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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
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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.
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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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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.
Doris Lessing
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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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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.
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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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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Doris Lessing