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There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

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
Great
Conscious
Line
Behinds
Behind
Lines
Past
Women
Stretching
Find
Seek

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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.
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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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 don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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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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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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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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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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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
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I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
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Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
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This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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