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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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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.
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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
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You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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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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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
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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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Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
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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.
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
Doris Lessing