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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.

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
Human
Humans
Treasure
Contact
Solitude
Doesn

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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.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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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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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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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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When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.
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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
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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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You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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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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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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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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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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