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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.

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
Spendthrift
Courtiers
Attendant
Passion
Every

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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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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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Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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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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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
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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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I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
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There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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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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Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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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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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
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