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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
Terrible
Everyone
Left
Every
Life
Banal
Commonplace
Phases
Finished

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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.
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
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The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
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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.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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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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Literature is analysis after the event.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
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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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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
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What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
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I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.
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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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