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When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

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
Sense
Guilt
Accident
Human
Avoid
Chief
Humans
Brings
Chiefs
Fumes
Looks
Deny
Native
Whip
Men
Justice
Africa
Denies
Eyes
Accidents
Whips
Eye
Sees
Preoccupation
White
Diversity
Resentment

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
Doris Lessing
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
Doris Lessing
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When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
Doris Lessing
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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.
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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Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
Doris Lessing
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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
Doris Lessing
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
Doris Lessing
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
Doris Lessing
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
Doris Lessing
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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
Doris Lessing
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
Doris Lessing
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There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
Doris Lessing
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
Doris Lessing
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
Doris Lessing