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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

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
Tolerable
Superstition
Superstitions
Consider
Worst

More quotes by 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.
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I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?
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You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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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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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
Doris Lessing
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
Doris Lessing
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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
Doris Lessing
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing
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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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What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
Doris Lessing
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As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
Doris Lessing
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I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
Doris Lessing
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The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
Doris Lessing
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Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
Doris Lessing
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
Doris Lessing
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What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
Doris Lessing
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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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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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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing