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Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

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
Stories
Legacy
Precious
Experiences
Songs
Humanity
Wisdom
Story
Construct
Song
Constructs

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
Doris Lessing
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Better Counsel comes overnight.
Doris Lessing
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
Doris Lessing
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What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
Doris Lessing
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
Doris Lessing
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
Doris Lessing
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You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
Doris Lessing
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In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
Doris Lessing
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
Doris Lessing