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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.

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
Certainty
Condition
Accept
Conditions
Accepting
Certain
Insecure
Uncertain

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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
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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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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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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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We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
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I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
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What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
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Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
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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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But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
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Curse not the king, no not in thy thought and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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