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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.

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
Nobody
Stupid
Wells
Well
Cleverest
Believe
Trick
Believes
Tricks
Devil

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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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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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There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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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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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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It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
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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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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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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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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.
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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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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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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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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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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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I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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