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

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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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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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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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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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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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
Doris Lessing
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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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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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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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.
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I never stopped reading.
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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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I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
Doris Lessing
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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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Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
Doris Lessing
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It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
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I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
Doris Lessing