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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
Behind
Lines
Past
Women
Stretching
Find
Seek
Great
Conscious
Line
Behinds

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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
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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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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
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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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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.
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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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.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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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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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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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.
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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.
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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
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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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With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
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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.
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