Quote

Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

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
Language
Practical
Associations
Energy
Sentences
Repetitive
Culture
Ridiculous
Spin
Lost
Effect
Automatically
Become
Effects
Languages
Outstripped
Power
Development
Association
Dialects
Always
Sort
Phrases
Epochs
Words
Practicals
Dialect

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
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Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
Doris Lessing
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Doris Lessing
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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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You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
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The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
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The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
Doris Lessing
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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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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
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Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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For there is never any way to go but in.
Doris Lessing
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All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
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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It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
Doris Lessing
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing