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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

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
Words
Nothing
Mean
Vertigo
Afflicted
Increasingly

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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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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
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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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Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
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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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America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
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I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
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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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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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