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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

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
Ideals
Art
Betrayed
Mirror
Mirrors

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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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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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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You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
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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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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
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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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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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Literature is analysis after the event.
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All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.
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The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
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Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
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[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
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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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All things come alike to all there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
Doris Lessing
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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
Doris Lessing