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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.

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
Phases
Finished
Terrible
Everyone
Left
Every
Life
Banal
Commonplace

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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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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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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
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I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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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.
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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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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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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.
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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 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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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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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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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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